Time Out
by therealamphibiousnewt
Summary: The monster was probably already there when Thomas met Newt, sitting like a killer in wait, lounging around just behind the blonde boy's frontal lobe and biding its time until it was strong enough to make a difference. There was never Newt without the monster, not to Thomas. College AU. Newt has cancer AU. Slow burn, angsty. Chiefly NewtxThomas with slight Thomesa and Trenda.
1. Chapter 1

**First Maze Runner fic, very very new to this fandom, but this idea struck me and I ended up working on it for nanowrimo. It's big, it's probably going to be about 80k words big. It's a slow burn. It's angsty. I'm so excited to share it with you.**

* * *

 **December**

00000

It's easy to think of the tumor as a monster. As some foreign, awful thing eating away at Newt's life, at everything that he is. But really? It's a timer. It's a horrible clock that puts pressure on decisions no one is ready for.

The monster was probably already there when Thomas met Newt, sitting like a killer in wait, lounging around just behind the blonde boy's frontal lobe and biding its time until it was strong enough to make a difference. There was never Newt without the monster, not to Thomas. And maybe that's part of it, maybe that's part of this pounding in his chest, this sickly churning in his stomach, confusion and urgency and doubt mixed together in a toxic cocktail.

But he doesn't think so.

Yes, the monster is eating away at Newt. But it's like peeling an orange, revealing something fragile and important. Something to be savored.

And maybe there isn't a word for this, maybe it's something new and ambiguous as it feels. But there's not time to care about titles anymore, not with the monster tapping at its watch and counting down until…Until. There's no point in fretting, nothing but minutes and hours and _months_ lost to confusion and denial and pointless, mind-numbing circles paced around Thomas's bedroom, thinking of the boy down the hall.

There's no point now in anything but action. The only thing to do is to seize the time Newt has— _they have_ —left and spend it doing something other than pacing. Thomas rehearses something like a speech as he walks purposefully to his bedroom door, yanks it open and trots down the hallway, slowing by the stairs in hopes that the other boy's won't hear him over the sound of their movie. He knocks on Newt's door once. Twice. Trying not to think about the last time he was inside, kissing the other boy for all of the wrong reasons, blind to the right ones as he is now, but more determined to _think_ instead of _do_.

Newt opens the door, blank faced, those steel vaults solid and impenetrable behind his eyes.

"Can I come in?"

"Why?"

"Because we don't have time to do this stupid shuck dance," it's the last thing Thomas expects to fall out of his mouth, given that his head is full of nothing but professions about the impermanence of life and how he has weird thoughts when Newt smiles.

"You're finally catching on, Tommy."

Thomas leans in and kisses him, and it's stupid and electric and a really shucking bad idea. But it's the only idea, the only way that anything can move forward and the only thing _worth_ moving forward. His hand finds the back of Newt's neck and holds him close as Thomas steps into Newt's room, shutting the door behind them.

Newt pulls back, his breath shockingly cool against Thomas's cheek, "Why?"

"Because I would hate it if anyone else called me Tommy," he starts in a shaky voice, planting his lips against Newt's cheek. It's cheesy and stupid, and he feels like an idiot but it's worth it when Newt sighs, relaxing slightly, his forehead resting against Thomas's. Another kiss on the cheek, "because I can't make myself give a shuck about anything other than what's happening to you." Thomas's hand moves down to Newt's back, squarely between his too evident shoulder blades, pulling him into a hug so tight it would be painful if it weren't so unbelievably necessary, "because I can't think of any reason why not and you don't have time for me to waste coming up with one." Thomas tucks his face into the side of Newt's neck, because somehow this is too private, and it feels like such a good place to hide. A secure corner out in the open, a space where he won't be judged, where he doesn't have to be anyone better or smarter or braver than the mythical _Tommy_ that only Newt seems to see. "Because it feels right even when nothing else does. Because I don't think I've ever loved anyone but Chuck, but I can't come up with another word for this."

"Tom—"

"And you know what else?" Thomas lets go all at once, instantly cold and idiotic as he paces the room just like he thought he didn't have time for. "I have all these stupid instincts. Whenever something happens, you're the first person I want to tell. When you're cold, I want to warm you up. I want to get you away from everything that's hurting you, and most of the time it's yourself!"

"I can't help this thing in my head!" It's too loud, Newt's eyes too wild, nearly glowing with their sudden burst of fury.

"But you don't think about anything else!" Thomas flops on the foot of Newt's bed, cradling his head in his hands. The bed is unmade, there's a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, a half-eaten bagel on the night stand. "I want to give you something else to think about."

Thomas looks up and swallows hard, "and I have no shucking idea why, but I want the something else to be me."

00000

 **September**

00000

Thomas never really thought about joining a fraternity until he read his scholarship in whole. It would cover the dorms but not a meal plan, or a lump sum. And the Gamma Lambda Delta fraternity offers a joining discount to athletes and another joining discount to students with a GPA above a certain level and—and well after triple checking his math, he should be able to live in the house in a single room where his little brother Chuck can sleep over sometimes and if he lives on ramen and frozen waffles, the savings from his summer job should be enough.

He runs through the math again in his head, irrationally nervous when a pair of hands he doesn't recognize tie a blindfold behind his head with disconcerting efficiency. He knows hazing is a thing that only really happens in those awful lifetime movies his foster mom would watch on full volume at two in the morning, and he knows this is probably something stupid, but fight or flight thrums in his brain and erases everything else. He should run. He should rip this fabric off of his head and just fucking run. He knows in this terrifying moment that running is what he's good at and what he should be doing.

The smell of the room hits him all at once, cleaning solvent and something dusty, and the fact that he doesn't know any of these people hits him solidly in the chest. He could be entering into some violent secret society. He doesn't know anything but the rent is cheap and the two guys he talked to didn't kill him in the spot.

The crowd is laughing behind him, pauses punctuated with fluttering, anxious breaths of the new recruits. Thomas can feel his chest trembling and he barely resists the urge to rip off the blindfold.

"Calm the shuck down, Greenie," hands on his shoulders are surprisingly gentle, the disjointedly British voice in his ears low enough that the boys around him won't hear it. "We're taking you to the bloody basement, stop acting like you're about to beat every shank in the room and run for it."

"Do I have to be blindfolded—"

"Shhh," the voice is a whisper across his ear, and he shivers, a combination of dissipating fear and over concentrated adrenaline.

They march down to the basement, an intermingling of sure footed current fraternity members and stumbling pledges. The footsteps immediately behind Thomas are slightly uneven, a clomp-thump, clomp-thump, that somehow makes more sense of the size of the stairs than the even trudging in front of him. His mysterious guide pressing on his shoulders after he takes exactly three steps from the base of the stairs, signaling for him to stop.

"Alby's going to talk for a moment," the hands leave his shoulders, "then you can run away all you like."

"Pledges," a deep voice booms from the corner, electronically magnified and drawing stifled snickers from the crowd gathered behind the line of boys to either side of Thomas. "Welcome to the Glade. From this moment on, we will be your family. You will follow our rules and we will embrace you. And with _this_!"

Thomas is doused with freezing water that sucks the air out of his lungs. A boy down the row yelps, another swears. The water drips through Thomas's clothes, past his belt, tracing frigid lines down his legs and soaking his shoes. That's going to be fun to run in tomorrow.

Behind him, the crowd breaks into laughter and happy hoots. Thomas is clapped on the back by what feels like dozens of hands.

"You are baptized into the Glade!" The booming voice cuts out with a whistle of static and Thomas yanks instantly at the blindfold across his face, dropping the scrap of fabric to the ground and wiping still freezing water away from his forehead.

"Sorry about kidnapping you," a hand appears in front of him. A hand attached to a tall, lanky blonde boy who honestly looks some kind of apologetic beneath his grin. "I'm Newt."

"N-nice to m-meet you."

"The freezing water is bloody awful, isn't it?" He laughs, shaking Thomas's hand and wiping the residual clamminess on his jeans. "I don't know why Alby shucking insists on this klunk. Some shank back in his day made him to do it and he holds a buggin' grudge."

"What?"

"Sorry," Newt—and what kind of a name is that, in the first place?—shakes his head and grins, and it's the only thing that's really seemed friendly since Thomas left Chuck at his foster house with a long, reassuring hug. "The accent can't help make sense of all the Glader slang at once, can it? I was bloody confused myself, getting a bucket of water over my head with a bunch of prats calling me a shank."

Thomas's mouth flaps wordlessly for a second before he shakes his head, more ice cold water dribbling from his hair just when he thought he managed to warm it all to a tolerable temperature, "I'm Thomas."

"What was that? Tommy?" Newt leans in, hand to his ear, "couldn't hear you over all of the bloody shivering." He turns and calls over his shoulder, "hypothermia doesn't breed shucking brotherhood, Alby you shank."

"Uh, Thomas. Actually."

He leads Thomas towards the base of the stairs with a beckoning hand, and Thomas can't help but notice a slight asymmetry to his gait. The uneven steps on the stairs, "I'll show you to your room, Tommy, I'm assuming you want to change. Now you see why we told you shanks to leave your stuff outside, I guarantee there's one bloody greenie in there whose cell phone got soaked." Newt turns to him at the top of the stairs, "it's not you is it?"

"No," Thomas looks around the house, somehow stunned by it, stunned that he's living here, after ten years in foster homes and a month in the school's worst dorm, where mold crept down the wall of his filthy triple room.

It's painfully upper-middle class. High ceilings, a fifty inch TV in the living room across from a comfortable looking couch. Three or four well-loved game consoles he drooled over as a child are on the stand beneath it and the kitchen to his left shows clear signs of being cooked in. Two or three dirty plates in the sink, a pot drying on the rack.

"It's ok," Newt claps him on the back, "I was a bit gobsmacked myself when everyone wasn't doing a constant kegstand and drinking out of shucking red plastic cups."

"Sorry, I'm just—"

"S'alright," Newt leads to the front door, "I could tell you were a bit shell shocked down there, some people don't take too well to the whole, blindfolded to the basement douse with shucking freezing water. Some shanks think it's funny, but I think the whole…charade is a bit past bloody unnecessary. Where's your stuff?"

Thomas rifles through the stacks of suitcases and plastic bins on the lawn, yanking his duffel bag over his shoulder and shrugging, "this is it."

"Light packer," Newt holds his hand out for the bag and Thomas shakes his head. He wants to say that he's usually more talkative than this. He doesn't know why he's filled with the urge to assure Newt that he's not wasting his friendliness on a crazy mute.

"What's with all the slang?" Thomas blurts, his mind suddenly filling with questions as a few more boys leave through the front doors, most of them dry and grinning, a few more soaked and seemingly shocked that their ordeal is over.

"Glader thing," Newt starts leading the way back towards the house again, "no idea when it started, but we all pick it up after a few months, pretty shucking reliably. Makes swearing in front of the general public a good bit easier though." He grins over his shoulder as he starts to climb the stairs, his limp once again pronounced.

Thomas wants to ask him about it, but that's a question he's smart enough to swallow, "How long have you been here?"

"Two years," Newt shrugs, "I was a greenie my first year too. It's better than the dorms, definitely. My room is right down there, the loo straight across from the stairs, and you're down at the other end. A bit of a small room, but next year you can take over someone else's."

For someone who's never had their own room before, any sort of personal space sounds blissful and Thomas steps into the space behind Newt. There's a twin bedframe with a bare mattress pressed into the corner and Thomas sets his bag down on it.

"It's great."

"I take it you want to get changed," Newt flicks the light on, "but then you should come downstairs, there's a bit of a party starting."

"Yeah," Thomas nods, more questions blurring together under the fading veneer of general shock. "I'll be down in a few."

"See you then, Tommy." Newt claps him on the shoulder and Thomas can't quite bring himself to correct him.

Thomas hangs his clothes to dry over his bedframe and rifles for his suitcase for dry ones, dropping his stack of well-used sheets on the bed and yanking out a pair of jeans. Music starts up downstairs and voices fill the hallway, new boys moving into their rooms. The house is too big to be residential, obviously built by the school for exactly this purpose. There must be a dozen small bedrooms along the hallway and the basement looked similar, from what Thomas saw.

He takes a minute to change and dry his hair, standing by the doorway and taking in the peace of the tiny room. His room. The music downstairs sounds less foreboding all of a sudden, less intimidating, more like it's for him instead of against him.

He tugs on a clean tee shirt and closes the door behind him on the way downstairs. The room is still relatively empty, his new housemates relaxed and milling around two or three wet heads recognizable and nervous among the older, comfortable mass. Thomas walks downstairs, searching for a familiar face and seeing Newt in the corner talking to the tall black boy he met at recruitment. Newt smiles and waves him over, slinging an easy arm over his shoulders.

"Greenie, this is Alby, you have him to thank for the ice bath."

"When tradition falls apart, all of this klunk falls apart," Alby claps Thomas on the shoulder. "What's your name again, Greenie? I've got to get you on the chore schedule—"

"It's a party, Alby," Newt rolls his eyes, "can't it wait?" Newt leans in to talk closer to Thomas as someone turns the music up, "Alby just got elected president last week, keeps talking about shucking changes, I think it's all gone to his head." He raises his voice, talking to Alby too, "I'll introduce him around, get another greenie to start vacuuming."

Newt leads him around the party, introducing him to a blur of faces and names. Everyone has their jobs, their cliques, their majors. There's a cluster of architecture majors in the basement who apparently don't get along too well with the wannabe veterinarians they share space with. A sophomore named Gally stands out, only because he tells Thomas "to stay off of his turf", and so does Minho, a guy that Thomas knows of from cross country practice. They're talking about an upcoming race, Thomas getting more than a little lost in the 'Glader slang', when the door opens and a small group of girls walks in.

"Know any of them?" Minho asks with a knowing smile, looking over his shoulder at the group. Thomas frowns at the girl in the front, something about her hair ringing a bell, the contrast of it with the pale skin of her shoulders.

"I think I might."

The girl looks his way and cocks her head slightly, blue eyes squinting, confused, before springing open. She says something to her friends and slips through the crowd towards them, catching Thomas in an unexpected side hug.

"Thomas!" She yells over the music, smiling a particularly blinding smile and keeping her hand on his arm. "I had no idea you went to school here, why haven't I seen you around?"

"Right," Thomas nods, because he definitely does know her, and she obviously knows him. Newt pats his back and disappears into the thickening crowd with Minho.

"You don't remember me?" She smacks his arm, "third period English? Last year?"

"Right! Teresa, right?"

"Yes!" She laughs, "I'm glad to know I wasn't that invisible."

"Not invisible at all," Thomas laughs, because he wants her to stick around. "I was just always busy—"

"Yeah, yeah, busy being the best at everything," she moves closer to him so that he can hear her, "so you're a Glader now? I never would have picked you for the fraternity type."

"I didn't realize you were picking me for anything."

Her smile feels like home, like high school hallways that seem so welcome now that college is so big and daunting. His throat is dry looking at her and he swallows.

"Do you want to go get a drink?" She reads his mind, gesturing towards the kitchen and he shrugs and nods at the same time, an awkward word of jiggling that makes her laugh. She has a nice laugh, a familiar laugh, and he follows her.

00000

Thomas is late to chemistry lecture, slipping in through a side door and carefully easing the door closed behind him and sitting in the nearest seat. He pulls out his notebook and flips to the page for the last class. The girl beside him pushes her hood back, her feet kicked easily up on the chair in front of her as she grins at him.

"You haven't missed anything."

"Thanks."

She holds out her hand, "Brenda, by the way."

"Thomas," he shakes it, easing slightly into his seat. Brenda's backpack is zipped at her feet and she's watching the professor with half of her attention, nibbling on her fingernails and glancing sideways at Thomas.

"You're on the cross country team, right? I think I recognize you from one of those pictures of you winning." She doesn't say it like a compliment, and Thomas looks at her carefully, curiously. "I got the right guy?"

"Yeah, I'm on the cross country team, but I didn't realize the world was so inundated with pictures of me winning things."

"And somehow, your head remains normal sized," she grins, the expression mischievous on her face. With her short, messy hair and wide brown eyes, she looks like she hasn't realized she's grown up yet. "What's your major?"

"Pre-med," Thomas nods slowly, hating the sound of it the more times he says it. It's like someone else's idea of success, someone else's plan for him. Brenda nods slowly, tapping her heel against the back of the seat in front of her. Someone down the row glares and Thomas shrinks slightly in his seat.

"What? Shy even after posing for all those pictures?" She nudges him with her elbow, too friendly, everything about her tone teasing and familiar.

"I didn't pose."

"And you're photogenic too?" She shakes her head, "some people just have all the luck."

00000

Minho approaches Thomas outside of the locker room after practice, adjusting his bag on his shoulder, "Hey Greenie."

"Do you _really_ have to call me that?"

"Seeing that you're a greenie," Minho falls into step beside him, and it's a different sort of comfortable than when they ran together earlier, more companionable when they can talk without wheezing. "I do. Newt and I were planning on hanging out, and he wanted to ask you this morning, apparently, but missed you, so I have to do his shucking dirty work." It's not real irritation in Minho's voice, but something hinting at a larger, more familiar relationship with the friendly blond.

"What are you guys doing?"

"Probably playing video games. Just unwinding from the week," he shrugs, "Newt thinks you're pissed at him or some klunk, for the whole ice bucket thing. At least you didn't have your shucking phone in your pocket."

"I'm not, I just don't know him—"

"You don't know anybody," Minho cuts him off. He has a way of saying things, kind and cruel all at once, and Thomas thinks he understands what tough love is supposed to be for the first time. "And Newt is literally the nicest shank on the planet. We've been friends since high school, I don't know if I would have gotten into the glade if it weren't for Newt. Shuck, I only joined the track team because he told me I should."

"You sound like you're selling him."

"I promised I'd get you to come," he knocks his elbow against Thomas's, "I could start selling myself but that might make things awkward when you couldn't resist and…well, you know how it goes."

"I _don't_ know how it goes," Thomas shakes his head, "are you offering to show me?"

Minho punches his shoulder and he feigns kneeing the other boy in the stomach, and they walk back to the house together, a little more comfortable.

Newt is kicked back on the couch, the Nintendo 64 stretched under the coffee table so that its wired controllers reach the couch. He grins when he sees Thomas, scooting to make room for the two of them.

"I was inspired," he tells Minho, handing him one of the ancient, well-loved controllers. "I think I figured out how to beat this bloody thing."

"And what's the brilliant plan?" Minho flops down in the middle of the couch, his expression suddenly the steely mask Thomas recognizes from the starting line of their first big race.

"We haven't shucking played in a month, we need to keep trying."

"I wasn't expecting anything brilliant anyway," Minho rolls his eyes at Newt, looking up at Thomas. "We've been trying to beat the original Mario Party with the computers on difficult for two years. One of them always beats one of us."

"How many times have you two done this?" Thomas sits down on the open end of the couch beside Minho, laughing to himself at the abysmal graphics.

"Not enough," Minho watches the bright and peppy loading screen with an expression of such intense focus that Thomas half expects lasers to blast out of his eyes and blow the TV apart. "We obviously haven't cracked it yet."

"We've tried everything," Newt counts on his fingers, leaning back against the couch cushion and shifting back and forth, like a runner warming up for a race. "We've worked up to it, starting with the computer on easy, then medium, then difficult. We've played as every possible assortment of these shanks. We've tried every map. Twice."

"What about the computers—"

"Tried it, Tommy. We have the best luck against Mario and Luigi, but not by much."

"And I play like shuck without Wario," Minho glares at Thomas when he laughs. "Two years. We've been working on this for two years. We started it our first week on a whim but then _some_ shank doesn't—"

"There's got to be a solution." Newt picks up the controller in front of him, thumbs stretched comfortably across the plastic. "It wouldn't be an option if there weren't a solution."

"Plus, we're still beating records." Minho shrugs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Sign me up," Thomas reaches for a spare controller on the floor but Newt stops him with a stern hand on his arm.

"Have you ever played Mario Party, Tommy?" The blonde quirks his eyebrow, and Thomas feels like a kid trying to drive without a license. He swallows against a blush that appears for absolutely no reason. Minho snorts at him.

"I've played Mario Kart, with my brother. I've won on rainbow road."

"On wii?" Newt asks, all knowing, his head cocked slightly. Thomas shrugs.

"We'll practice later," Minho tosses Thomas a can of soda. "But right now, just try and learn something."

"You _do_ take this seriously. I thought Alby was kidding." The president had cautioned the whole crop of greenies about the oldest console on their tour of the glade the morning after the party.

"Alby doesn't kid," Newt nudges his shoulder against Thomas's. "Hand me my drink, would you?"

Minho selects Wario, his face back to that mask of intense concentration as he looks towards Newt, who chooses Yoshi with a definitive twitch of his thumb.

"We've found we're better if we just play our favorites," he explains, Yoshi doing a little turn as Newt toggles the controller.

"And Newt is Yoshi, because they're both adorable little lizards." Minho pinches Newt's cheek. Newt shoves him off, fighting off a grin.

"Stop bloody showing off," Newt turns towards the TV, selecting Mario and Luigi as the computer's characters, difficult as the level.

"If we're not showing off, why did you invite an audience?" Minho grins at Thomas, elbowing Newt in the side and flicking through the first few maps. "Which map are we playing?"

"I don't give a shuck," Newt runs his hand over his face. "Let's just do this."

As ridiculous as this all is, Thomas can't help but admire his determination.

* * *

 **So. There will be a few pairings floating around for the first part of it...but I hope it's pretty clear where this is going...**


	2. Chapter 2

**And here we go…**

00000

The living room is crowded when Thomas walks in, and everyone looks up for a second then back at the TV, Newt raises his hand in greeting.

"What's on?" Thomas glances at the TV just in time to see a car blow up, a man on a motorcycle racing away from it.

"Everyone has the same calculus test day after tomorrow," Newt nudges Gally with his toe and the boy looks up from his seat on the floor, obviously irritated at being reminded.

"We would rather procrastinate together," Gally shrugs, not making eye contact with Thomas, obviously still irritated at him for absolutely no reason at all. "With Jason Statham."

"That and Newt looked way too peaceful sitting on the couch and reading something other than a shucking calculus book," Minho glares at the blonde, "the lucky shank."

"I went through buggin' hell last year, thanks very much." Newt kicks Minho in the hip before twisting to sit normally and patting the cushion beside him. "Tommy, come protect me, before he retaliates."

"And all of you shanks shut up, this is the best part," Ben glares at Thomas too, like this too is his fault, but Thomas ignores it, stepping carefully through the group sitting on the floor and squeezing into the honestly too small space besides Newt. Something else blows up on screen and a woman in a leather jump suit saunters out of a building holding a rocket launcher.

"Of course. Newbie gets a seat on the couch," Gally grumbles, but honestly? All of this ignoring him is great practice and Thomas barely notices. Especially after Newt kicks Gally in the back with some kind of force.

Thomas's phone buzzes and he pulls it out of his pocket, his shoulder jostling against Minho, who shifts and makes about a half inch more room that doesn't help anything at all. It's a text from Newt and Thomas glances at Newt, who is staring contentedly at the TV, his phone in his hand on the arm of the couch.

' **i know the calculus ta, apparently the test is being moved to next week.'**

The corner of Thomas's mouth twitches, a jolt of slightly sadistic joy blooming at the sight of Gally's markedly anxious profile. He would feel bad about it, if the other boy would stop trying to prank him in the middle of the night. **'all this procrastination for nothing'**

Newt smiles at the response, texting back with a long, almost lazy thumb dragging across his phone's screen, **'I'm sure they'll do it again next week. Especially if I'm enjoying the quiet.'**

Thomas's phone buzzes again, a notification from some ap he doesn't care about, and Minho elbows him less than gently in the side, "are you even watching this, bro?"

Something about Thomas's expression makes Minho smirk, leaning back and sideways slightly, suddenly taking up far more than his third of the couch. Thomas's knee bumps against Newt's.

' **So much for sharing the couch.'**

Newt smiles at that, texting briefly with both hands and tucking his phone in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, **'That's the retaliation. Better you than me'**

00000

"It was shucking luck, greenie!" Minho jumps up from the couch, pointing at the TV and yelling. Gally's voice echoes down the hallway 'Slim it!' but Minho ignores it entirely. "It was luck, I've never lost that game to anyone—"

"Except me and Princess Peach," Thomas grins and Newt claps him on the back.

"I think we should let him join the real game."

"Just because of one lucky game?" Minho has sprouted a throbbing vein above his left eyebrow and Thomas laughs.

"Because it'll be easier to beat one bloody computer than two," Newt elbows Thomas, grinning at him conspiratorially. "Plus, seems like Tommy's lucky with Princess Peach."

"And he's a shucking girl _hoarder_ , why would we want him joining the game?" Minho sits down, deflating comically quickly. "First that girl at the party—"

"Teresa—"

"Until she introduces us all to some of her friends, she's 'that girl'," Minho leans back, looking at Thomas carefully, "and then I hear about you and some girl in your Chemistry class—"

"Brenda—"

"Same rule, they are that shucking girl and some shucking girl and—"

"Careful, you sound just a bit bitter," Newt stands up and ruffles Minho's hair on the way to the kitchen to grab a soda.

"And now Peach."

"Do you want to play as Peach?" Thomas holds his controller towards Minho, laughing when the other boy turns off the console, sliding back under the coffee table and out of sight. "It seems like you're pretty cut up about it, I don't want to take your girlfriend—"

"Have fun playing as Peach _forever_ ," Minho says decisively and Newt laughs on his way back into the room.

He perches on the arm of the couch by Thomas's hand, sending a text before tucking his phone in his pocket, "Alby's staying late in the computer lab again, I don't think he's been home all week."

"He's a grown shank," Minho stands up and brushes himself off, "I should probably get to my dojo, so I'll see you shanks later."

"You're in a karate class just to say 'dojo', aren't you?"

"Slim it, Greenie. It's supposed to help with my self-control," he rolls his eyes in that way lucky kids do when they're complaining about their parents. "But I've whooped every 'black belt' in the place so…"

"What belt are you, again?" Newt grins smugly, the expression only brightening when Minho flips him off.

"White. They don't appreciate my genius."

"They don't appreciate you slugging everyone in the shucking chin."

"I will see you guys later," Minho rolls his eyes, loping out of the room like he's running late.

Newt turns to Thomas, "I promised I'd bring Alby some pizza, want to come?" He stands and grabs Thomas's hand, dragging him to his feet, "it's all you can eat college night."

"I bet I can eat zero, because I've got five dollars to last me until the end of next week."

"I've got you," Newt drags him towards the door, "just eat a lot to make it bloody worth it."

"Newt, you don't have to—"

"I know," he pauses for a second, pensive, "you know, I'm not going to ask you to pay me back. It's not a shucking debt, it's pizza."

"I'll get next time," Thomas grabs his jacket and follows Newt out of the front door.

It's decidedly fall now, leaves yellowing, the air cool and damp with a crisp edge, and they walk together down the main street of campus and into town. Newt's limp is a distinctive hitch in his step and Thomas almost asks about it for what feels like the thousandth time. He's never broken a bone himself and he tells himself that's why he's curious, not because it's _Newt._ He doesn't seem to be in pain, he doesn't slow down when cut grass or fallen leaves lay thickly on the sidewalk, and Thomas tries to accept it as an innocuous part of him.

Asking Newt why he limps would be like asking him why his eyes are brown or why he's never met someone who isn't his friend. The thought stirs more questions in his mind instead of quieting them.

The pizza place is at the far end of the main street, and it's busy with college students taking advantage of the deal written in bright paint on the front window: 'College ID, all you can eat Mondays, $6.75'. They find a table near the back and get first plates of pizza with irregular toppings, like chicken and pepperoni or Hawaiian without the ham, that give away the restaurant's brilliant plan to clean out the deep freeze into the all-accepting stomachs of poor college students.

"Alby and I used to come every week freshman year," Newt looks around, "my freshman year. He was a sophomore, and people actually shucking saw him, because he left the computer lab occasionally."

"I can't believe that," Thomas shakes his head, mock serious. "Next you're going to tell me people did chores when they felt like it."

"I'm not here to lie to you, Tommy."

Conversation is easy with Newt. Thomas has never been good at superficial, he can't carry on a conversation with a stranger about the weather, his manners begin and end at 'have a nice day', but Newt makes it easy, digging barely into a wide variety of topics from TV shows to professors to antics at the glade before Thomas's time. He learns that Newt hates cop dramas, is majoring in botany because of the garden his parents never let him have as a kid, and that Gally got so drunk as a greenie that he threw up all over the entry way.

"That explains a lot," Thomas laughs, "he's trying to drive me to drink so I do it more spectacularly and everyone forgets about him."

"Don't tell him I told you," Newt narrows his eyes for a second, just long enough for Thomas to wonder if he's serious, before laughing. "He's a…well, I won't lie to you, he's a bit abrasive, but Alby says it's good to keep blokes like that around. Gives the whole thing an air of impenetrability."

"Careful discussing the secret society around all of these non-initiates," Thomas gestures to the busy restaurant and Newt laughs.

"Don't worry, it's all in shucking code."

"Makes sense now." Thomas remembers that first night, Newt's voice in his ear, only half in English.

Newt gets a text and answers it, his lips twitching vaguely as he puts his phone back in his pocket, "Minho's wondering where we are. Seems to think getting pizza doesn't take this long."

"What time is it?"

"Almost seven," Newt stands up, "Alby's probably thinking I forgot about him. I'll go order his take out and we can go."

Thomas sees Newt reaching for his wallet and cocks his head, "but it's all you can eat, you don't need to pay for it, do you?"

"It's not all you can carry, I doubt they'd make any buggin' money that way."

"Well, what if I ate more than I did, they'd never know," Thomas looks around, spying a box of flat pizza boxes in the corner. He pulls one off of the stack and folds it neatly against his thighs, "I knew that summer at Domino's would come in handy someday."

"Tommy—"

"I'm getting you back," he grins, picking up his plate and handing it to Newt. "Go through the buffet, we'll leave through the back, no one will ever know the difference."

"You physically cannot leave the bloody rules be, can you?" Newt shakes his head, and there's a second where Thomas almost thinks he's going to report him to someone for stealing a box, but his expression lifts into an impish grin and he looks towards the buffet table, a kid sneaking into his parents' closet to peek at the presents before Christmas morning.

And it's funny, because in the scope of Thomas's life, when he's had so many so-called-siblings carted off for vandalism and joyriding and all manner of unsupervised mayhem, stretching the meaning of 'all you can eat' seems like nothing. He wouldn't do it if Chuck were here, wouldn't want to be a bad influence, but Newt's predominantly noble influence makes him want to let loose, to do something he wouldn't normally.

"I wouldn't say that. I'd say I test boundaries."

"Right, I'll remember that klunk in court," Newt heads towards the buffet, glancing back at Thomas once more with an exasperated smile.

00000

"No way!" Teresa laughs, looping her arm through Thomas's as they walk back towards the glade. Slow, meandering, fully conscious of the reasons for the longer route. She looks particularly pretty today, dark hair falling over her shoulders, framing bright blue eyes. "Jurassic Park was my favorite movie too! For years. I wouldn't stop pretending to be a t-rex and terrifying my little brother."

"That, I would like to see."

Teresa punches him in the side, "I didn't realize you were that kind of guy, Tom, asking for girls' best dinosaur impressions before the first date."

"I move fast and I play dirty," he laughs, and sometimes, he can't believe that this is his life. That a month ago, he was lonely in a moldy dorm with a tenuous acquaintance at cross country practice to call a friend. That a pretty girl who seems to know him like no one else showed up outside of his last class and offered to walk him home. They haven't talked much since that first night at the party, when they stayed up too late and had too much in common, and Thomas is pleasantly surprised when everything clicks back into place between them, precisely as he remembered it.

"I know that," she pauses, tapping between his eyes with the tip of her finger, "you aren't as mysterious as you make yourself out to be, you know. You wear everything right on your face."

He remembers a foster parent saying they couldn't see through him, that he must be hiding something, like secretive was the worst possible thing that a person could be, and the idea of being open feels good. He'd like to be that open guy that Teresa obviously wants him to be. It seems within his means and within his hopes all at once.

"I was never a very good liar, I think I just gave up at some point."

"Well there's no point around me anyway," she laughs, a light, tinkling sort of sound that's going to haunt his sleep. He's going to dream about that laugh. "I see right through you."

"Next you're going to tell me it's x-ray vision," he drags her around a corner, onto a side street, because he won't be late for anything if he drags this out later. He's not ready to say goodbye, not ready to stop looking at her, to stop watching what he says play out on her face. "That you can see me naked."

"I wish," she raises an eyebrow at him. "But unfortunately, my superpower is mindreading so…"

"What am I thinking right now?" They stopped walking at some point, they're facing each other, standing too close in the middle of the sidewalk and Thomas can't see how he didn't notice her before, at school. How he didn't notice her every second of every day. She tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles at him, eyes squinted in concentration.

"Blue. 11."

"Eerie," He catches her hands, because it feels right, even though her guess couldn't be more wrong. She looks a bit smug, adorably smug, and Thomas steps closer to her, wondering what would happen if they kissed.

He could kiss her. He could fall into her open expression, into her arms. He could take the pretty girl and the nice living arrangements and the new leaf. He thinks about it a second too long and an all too familiar yelp crashes through the moment.

"I cannot in good conscience leave you wandering around—"

"I'm not wandering, I'm going to my brother's house—"

"This is a college campus—"

"I don't know who you think you are, _sir_ ," the sarcasm dripping off of the last word spurs Thomas into action entirely and he spins in place, looking for the noise.

Across the residential intersection, a stern, rat-faced police officer is holding Thomas's brother Chuck's arm, and Chuck is shouting and fighting and Thomas's stomach drops to his feet. He pats Teresa awkwardly on the arm, darting across the street and sliding on the grass as he rests his hand on Chuck's shoulder.

"What seems to be the problem, erm, Officer?"

"Officer Janson."

"Officer Janson, what's the problem here?"

"Thomas!" Chuck jerks free of the officer's grip all at once, throwing his arms around Thomas's stomach. He pats his little brother's head, "See? I knew you'd be around—"

"Yeah, Chuck, I'm—"

"This is your younger brother?" Officer Janson looks Thomas up and down, and it's every high school officer who looked at him differently because his form said 'foster child'. He frowns, stepping in front of Chuck.

"Yeah, he's my younger brother. And I invited him over, alright?"

"Where do you live…?"

"Thomas," he fills in, unthinking, immediately regretting it.

"And a last name?" Officer Janson has a pad out, like he's taking notes on the entire situation. Recording it. Thomas shifts between his feet, pushing Chuck further behind him.

"Why do you need our last name? Are we in trouble?"

"No, son, but—"

"I'm not your son," Thomas snaps, spooked by a sudden warm hand against his shoulder. Teresa is there, looking earnest and helpful, her eyes wide at the situation. "Let's just go—"

"No, he just wants to talk, Tom," Teresa smiles, and it's suddenly awful and impossible and Chuck is trembling behind him, scared of the cops and not as grown or surly as he pretends to be.

"I really have to go," Thomas grabs Chuck's wrist, "we're late for something. He was coming over for an…a thing."

"Tom—"

"I'll talk to you later, Teresa," Thomas drags Chuck up the sidewalk too quickly, his brother stumbling slightly after him.

"Hey, slow down—"

"You could have called me—"

"They took my phone," Chuck sobs, wrenching Thomas's grip off of his arm and wiping his eyes with a rough hand. "They took it, and I'm…I'm _sorry,_ Thomas, I took the bus, I just didn't know where to go."

"Hey, buddy," Thomas pulls Chuck into a tight hug, looking over the top of his head at Officer Janson, who's still talking to Teresa. She's never going to talk to him again. He can't be upset about it, not when Chuck is crying, and they haven't seen each other in weeks. In all of the scattered confusion if his happy new life, he forgot about Chuck for a moment—just a moment—and he can never forgive himself. "Hey, you're fine, alright? My house is right around the corner."

The rest of the walk passes in silence, Chuck beside him, hiccupping at uneven intervals.

"Right here, see?" Thomas opens the door with his newly issued, still shiny key, "I've got the special key and everything. It's safe in here."

They walk in to most of the Gladers sprawled out over the couch and kitchen table, settled into homework. Thomas struggles not to freeze in the beam of attention, holding the door open to let Chuck in.

Gally sneers, "Greenie brought a _friend_."

"Slim it," Minho elbows the other boy hard enough that he drops his pencil.

"Who's this, Tommy?" Newt walks over, a friendly smile on his face, his eyebrow quirked in question as he extends his hand to Chuck.

"Uh, my little brother. It's—"

"I'm Chuck."

"Newt," he smiles, wrapping his arm around Chuck's shoulders, "I'll give you the tour."

Thomas mouths 'thank you' as Newt drags Chuck around the corner into the kitchen, looking curiously back at Thomas.

"Your little brother?" Minho cocks his head as soon as Chuck and Newt are out of earshot, "Is anything going on that we should know about?"

"Nah, it's just," Thomas looks at Gally and steels himself. "Family stuff. You know."

"Greenies don't have 'family stuff'," Gally mutters to himself, glaring at Thomas over the top of his textbook.

"Greenies are people too, shuckface," Minho elbows the other boy in the ribs, harder this time, hard enough that Gally coughs under his breath.

Thomas is in the hallway, following after Newt when his phone buzzes with a text from Teresa.

' **You should tell me what's going on.'** Followed by a smiley face he doesn't recognize, that his phone probably read incorrectly. He pauses for a moment, conflicted and confused. He wants to sit down and text her, wants to explain the situation but flinches at the details. He'd have to talk about his foster parents, about the agony of leaving Chuck behind.

He finds Newt at the end of the hallway on the second floor, showing Chuck Thomas's room.

"Messy git, your brother, always leaves his klunk shucking everywhere—"

"Thanks for that," Thomas steps up beside them, ruffling Chuck's hair and laughing when Chuck bats his hand away. There. That's more like it.

"It's true."

"Hey, dude, hang out in my room for a minute, alright? I'll be right in," Thomas pats his brother's shoulder and stands facing Newt for an awkward second.

"Rough at home?" Newt fills in with a sympathetic wince, clapping Thomas on the back.

"Something like that."

"I'll diffuse Gally, you two come down when you can."

"Thanks Newt."

"Slim it," Newt brushes him off, "We're supposed to be a shucking family. No one will care if your brother hangs out." He says it like a pronouncement and Thomas forgets about Teresa's text entirely as he slips inside of his room to talk to Chuck.

00000

"How does the chore system work, exactly?" Thomas stares at Alby's complicated whiteboard, sticky notes of different colors scattered across it.

"No one really knows," Newt shakes his head, but there's comprehension in his eyes as he skims it, "basically, I'm in charge of keeping the hallways clean and rooms well…sanitary," he grins, "no one else volunteered for that shuck job, it's hell getting Zart to take all his plates back to the kitchen once a week. Frypan manages kitchen schedules, but honestly, does most of it himself, and Minho's in charge of extra-curricular cleaning. If we throw a party or something like that. But the chart, the chart is madness."

"I can see that." Thomas looks up at the board again, "what do the sticky notes mean?"

"Trades, mostly. Alby wants to keep track and make sure everyone is doing _something_. He says it maintains order," there's a comfort when Newt talks about Alby, an audible friendship that Thomas finds himself oddly jealous of in the moment. Most of his friends have been coincidental, guys he knew from track or people he studied with, he's never had someone he _knew_ as a human being, aside from Chuck, before teen angst set in.

"What do you think?"

"What's that?" Newt cocks his head, and it's so open, just like everything else about him. Newt doesn't struggle making friends and that thought makes Thomas both jealous and optimistic.

"What do you think about all this…order stuff?"

"I think we've got almost thirty college aged shanks living under one roof and the university might get its security deposit back," the blond looks over his shoulder and around the house, like he's surveying it. "I think it makes us more of a group, blokes who clean together tend to stick together. Glader becomes an identity, instead of just a house." He laughs, "buggin' ridiculous, I know, but you bloody asked."

"No, it's—" Thomas isn't someone who tells secrets. He's someone who likes to think of himself as closed, as strong. He's something to be leaned on, someone who can be trusted to make the _right_ decisions without betraying his motives. He always had to be someone who trusted himself first, his own decisions were the only thing between success and well… _not_. But for what feels like the millionth time when he's talking to Newt, the honest truth bubbles anxiously at the back of his throat, trying to get out.

"You can say it, Tommy, it's shucking stupid. But you still have to vacuum when I tell you to."

"It's not. I'm just not used to it," he shrugs, "sort of…used to standing on my own."

"How's your brother? I saw he spent the night."

"Yeah," Thomas looks at Newt expecting a reprimand, for him to take back his kindness from the night before. Chuck makes everyone kind. Irritated, flustered, but kind.

Chuck was always the kid parents wanted to foster. Small, cute, friendly. That's how they got their first foster home, Chuck chatting with the parents in the halfway house about the picture he was coloring or the game he was playing. They usually lost interest when they saw Chuck came with a Thomas, though. The difficult one. The one with a file of escape attempts and lockpicking incidents. Thomas hated the halfway house, they wouldn't let him have his windows open at night and the smell reminded him of the hospital, of how the room felt when his mom was dying.

Newt stares at Thomas kindly, a little confused, a little worried, but doesn't reprimand.

"You know, for someone who asks so many bloody questions, you don't answer many."

"I don't have the answers people are looking for."

"That's the thing about being a part of something like this," Newt leans back against the counter and looks around, "it's not _people_ anymore, it's your friends."

It hits Thomas that he _likes_ Newt. He likes how Newt jokes with him and Minho, how Newt brings people into groups that otherwise wouldn't exist. He likes the way he calls him Tommy, like they've been friends forever. Newt makes Thomas understand inside jokes and why people like to be a part of them.

He wants to be able to talk about Newt the way Newt talks about Alby.

00000

 **Ok, this is one of the first things I've ever written where I reread it and get sucked in. Maybe that's just me. But I'm proud of it.**


	3. Chapter 3

**The plot doesn't thicken here...it comes into being. (I'm procrastinating. So here.)**

* * *

"What did you think?" Brenda trots up beside Thomas in the hallway after a quiz in their shared chemistry class, hooking her arm absently through his.

"Not that bad."

"Yeah, Mr. Speedy," she lets go, punching him gently on the arm. "I didn't think it was possible to finish one of those in less than ten minutes."

"I honestly figured there would be more to it," Thomas shrugs, "There wasn't anything on orbitals past d—"

"That's hilarious," she snorts. "The old 'make it sound like I didn't flip the paper over'. You're a real comedian." She narrows her eyes at him, "you don't have to be mean to make me nervous."

"I'm not trying to make you nervous?" Thomas stops. "And what do you mean 'flip the paper over'?"

She raises her eyebrows, "There was the short answer question about outer orbitals on the back? It wasn't on the front because the picture was too big to fit under the other questions?"

"Shuck," Thomas flushes, slapping his hand to his forehead.

"Did you honestly not look at the back of the paper—"

"No, I shucking didn't," Thomas sighs, spinning on the spot, holding his head between his hands and ignoring the boy that almost runs into him.

"Calm down," she grabs his arm with a laugh, "It's one quiz."

"That I'm going to literally shucking fail," he twitches away from her touch.

"Yeah, and you've aced every other thing so far."

He thinks about Chuck calling him in tears the night before, miserable at home, wishing he could be in college too. About his favorite pencil he stole from Newt snapping in the bottom of his backpack. About the upstairs toilet in the Glade flooding. Maybe it's just a turn for worst, all of these events forming some sort of celestial sign that says 'fuck you, Thomas.'

"And what if that's over?"

"Are you always such a pessimist?" She rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, and if she doesn't stop moving, he could almost believe she's as tall as she's pretending to be.

"I'm a realist with a lot of experience."

"Do you honestly think a single bad quiz is going to ruin your entire grade?"

"I think I can never be sure of what exactly is going to come back and bite me."

"Meet me here, midnight."

"What?" Thomas cocks his head and Brenda points outside at a maple tree, its leaves mottled crimson.

"Meet me at that tree at midnight."

"Does this have something to do with my quiz?"

"I can't trust you to keep your mouth shut," she saunters past him, her shoulder checking hard against his arm. "See you at midnight. If you're curious."

"Isn't that sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy?" He calls after her, stumbling when someone runs into him from behind. When he finds his bearings again, she's gone, disappeared into the taller crowd.

Newt and Minho are on the couch when he gets home, arguing too loudly about Mario Party. Minho threw his controller at some point at it's halfway across the room, on its back on the floor like a turtle turned on its shell.

"We need to practice crazy cutter," Newt shakes his head, brows furrowed in concentration.

"I need to practice kicking that shank Mario's ass."

"Yeah, and what did he just bloody beat you at?" Newt shakes his head, catching Thomas's eye and waving, "Tommy, come practice crazy cutter with me. Minho has to go punch a wall or something."

"You can practice mini-games?" Thomas walks up next to the couch, perching on the arm of it.

"Of course you can."

"But it's a waste of time," Minho shakes his head, "it's only a chance that they'll appear during your actual game."

"But you can be prepared," Newt sighs, "how did your quiz go, by the way?" He taps Thomas's leg with the back of his hand.

"Eh," he shrugs, "I forgot to check the back of the paper. So I failed it."

"Greenie mistake," Minho stands and picks up his controller, clicking the hard plastic back together with a practiced motion. "And fine. I'll practice. But if I kick your ass, we're playing another game."

"You want in?" Newt turns towards Thomas, eyebrows raised.

"Nah, I've got to go get some homework done. I'm meeting Brenda later."

"Ooh, hot date?" Minho grins at him before biting his lip in concentration as Newt presses start.

"I don't know," Thomas stands, his backpack sagging against his legs. "She wouldn't tell me. She just said, 'show up if you're curious'."

"Sounds like a hot date," Minho mutters 'shuck' under his breath when he messes up. Newt doesn't quite smile when he evidently wins, it's more of a smirk as he turns to Minho.

"You didn't need practice, then? I just thrashed you because you didn't need practice."

"Slim it," Minho presses start, "again."

Thomas waves and heads towards the stairs, waving a rude hand gesture over his head when Minho calls out loud enough for the whole house to hear that Thomas has a hot date. It's not even a date, let alone a hot date, it's some sort of mysterious meeting under a random tree in the middle of the damn night.

00000

Chuck shows up just past four on the bus, making himself at home on Thomas's bed.

"So you're going to meet a girl at midnight?" Chuck's own book is abandoned across his lap and he looks at Thomas curiously. Thomas wishes he remembered what his parents looked like, because he and Chuck are as brotherly as brothers can be, but they couldn't look more different. Maybe if Thomas had had enough food to build up that middle school chubbiness, maybe if Thomas hadn't been so constantly trying to escape at Chuck's age.

He's filled with a sudden burst of stubbornness to keep Chuck as innocent as he is right now.

"Yeah, and it's none of your business."

"Can I get a name?"

"You have one. It's Chuck." Thomas looks over his shoulder at his brother. "Don't you have homework to do?"

"So do you, but you're going to meet some girl—"

"Yeah and I'm in charge, so do your homework."

"Did you ever read this book?" Chuck groans, rolling onto his stomach, waving his copy of 'The Outsiders' in the air.

"Yeah, where are you confused?"

"The part where I have to read it when all your friends are playing video games downstairs."

"Hey," Thomas turns fully to face the younger boy, "if you ever want the chance to play video games downstairs with all your shucking college buddies, you have to do your homework."

"Ugh," Chuck groans, propping himself onto his elbows and holding the book to his nose. "Next you're going to be telling me to eat my shucking vegetables and giving me a bloody bedtime."

Thomas grins, "one, shuck is Glader slang and you haven't earned it. Two, bloody is British, copying Newt won't make you sound cool."

"I heard it on TV," Chuck bluffs, shrugging, crossing his ankles.

"No, you didn't."

"I thought I was supposed to be doing my homework," the younger boy says in a high pitched, irritating voice meant to sound like Thomas.

"Yeah, you are." Thomas checks his watch and looks at his homework spread out across the floor, dread brewing in his stomach because he isn't going to get this all done and he just failed a quiz. And he's the worst surrogate parent of all time.

"You're such a killjoy, you shank."

"And your bedtime is ten."

"Noooo," Chuck rolls over.

"I'll tell Newt, he's not too cool to enforce it."

Chuck whines about it excessively, slumping off to the bathroom to brush his teeth at nine thirty, complaining about the good old days when no one told him he had to go to bed. He doesn't mention going back to the foster home though, and when he grumpily slams Thomas's bedroom door and flops onto the mattress with a squeak that can be heard from the hallway, Thomas can't help but smile a little bit. It feels better knowing Chuck is sleeping with Miho and Alby on the same hallway.

He shoulders his backpack and walks downstairs, quickening slightly when he sees Newt with his homework spread out across the dining room table.

"Off for your 'hot date'?" The phrase sounds strange when Newt says it and Thomas sits down across from him, pulling his chemistry book back out of his backpack.

"Not for a while. But Chuck thinks you'll be enforcing his bedtime once I go," he opens it to the page where he left off, dragging his finger along the paragraphs to the last thing he remembers.

"Right, so as soon as you leave, wake him up, give him tons of sugar and violent video games."

"Exactly. You get it." Thomas falters, "not to be a complete shank, but…if you could actually help me out here, I'd really appreciate it. He might actually listen to you."

"And why is that?"

"He thinks you're cool," he laughs, "all night it was 'bloody' this and 'bloody' that. If you told him to go to bed, he probably wouldn't even slam any doors." Thomas frowns, "if that's not weird to ask for—"

"S'alright, Tommy." Newt punches his palm, the motion unpracticed and gangly and hilarious somehow and Thomas flushes, feeling stranger about asking. "I'm going to be here for a while anyway. I left this until the last minute."

"What are you working on?" Thomas leans forward to look at Newt's paper, a neat row of carefully drawn leaves, labelled with small, scrawled words.

"Plant Anatomy and Physiology," Newt nods slowly. "Wildly interesting, I know."

"No, that actually sounds cool."

"The shank professor thinks we're all buggin' art students," Newt picks up his paper, showing it to Thomas like a game show host. "What do you think of my leaves?"

Thomas reaches out and takes the paper, raising his eyebrows as he takes in the carefully sketched lines, the straight labels to either side. Newt's handwriting is messier than his drawing, uneven, small letters bunched together on immaculate lines. He looks up and Newt is looking at him slightly embarrassed, holding his hand out expectantly.

"Looks good," Thomas hands the sheet of paper back, picking up his pencil and tapping the eraser against the edge of his book. "I'd rather draw than try and get through the rest of this chapter."

"Excited about your _date_?" There's something dry in Newt's voice, like sandpaper and grit and Thomas looks up from his book, unreasonably irritated.

"It's not a date. It's some cryptic meeting with a cryptic girl."

"Why are you going, then?" Newt smiles, "I'll answer that for you. Because if there's a question to be answered, you physically cannot leave it alone."

"It's probably nothing."

"Yeah, but you're still going," the blonde shakes his head and leans back down over his drawing, his arm cocked out awkwardly to avoid smudging the lead as he starts on another careful leaf.

"I should stay here and finish this."

"You won't."

"You know me so well," Thomas shakes his head, checking his watch and sighing when he sees it's almost time to go. "If I don't come back, call the cops."

"I'll tell them you met the axe murderer under a random maple tree for some cryptic reason you didn't bloody know," Newt shakes his head, and from the way his face falls, he must have a lot left to do.

"I'll see you later," Thomas pulls his jacket off of the hook by the door, zipping it up halfway.

"See you, Tommy."

The walk down to campus is eerie, the frost crunching under his feet as he takes a shortcut across the quad, looking around for Brenda the entire time. If this is her idea of a joke, sending him out here in the middle of the shucking night to wait around in the freezing cold...it sounds more and more like Brenda's idea of a joke and he sighs, breath puffing out as a cloud of steam in front of him as he leans back against trunk of the maple tree.

"You made it."

He jumps, in spite of himself, his head snapping up to see Brenda sitting on the lowest branch beside him. She's nearly hidden by shadow, the black hood of her jacket pulled over her head, mysterious black lines drawn on her cheeks. She drops to the ground with a barely audible crunch of frost, "Let's do this."

She takes off across the quad at a jog, forcing Thomas to sprint a few steps to catch up to her.

"Are you going to tell me what we're doing?"

"We're fixing your quiz." The fumbles her keychain out of her pocket and unlocks the front door of the life sciences building with a near silent twist of a plain bronze key. "I'm a desk assistant upstairs," she shrugs, "but when my roommate sexiles me, this is an alright place to hang out."

She opens the door and slips inside, "come on."

The empty hallway sends a chill up the back of Thomas's neck, empty lab tables gleaming from either side, and he winces when his boots clunk heavily on the tile floor.

"We're not supposed to be in here."

"No one cares as long as you don't run around screaming."

"Someone is going to care if we break into a Professor's office."

"Eh," she pulls a clip out of her short hair as she turns abruptly to the right, trotting up the stairs, her footsteps just loud enough to make Thomas nervous. "It's right over here. He leaves his door unlocked most of the time anyway."

She stops and looks both ways before jiggling the handle of a door on the left side of the hallway, "there we go." It opens with a creak and a crunch and they duck inside, standing too close for a moment in the dark, listening for anyone outside.

Brenda flicks on the light.

"What are you doing?" Thomas reaches for the light switch but she cocks her head at him. "Turning the light on isn't exactly sneaky."

"How else are you going to find the quiz?"

"This is a horrible idea," he mumbles, "I don't care about the quiz. You were right earlier. I'm scared straight, can we go now?"

"Well, if you aren't going to fix yours," She shoves past him, rifling through a few stacks of paper on the counter.

"Come on, Brenda, that's cheating—"

"Do you ever loosen up?" She sets the papers down in a way that makes him think she never actually intended to find her paper.

"Not when—"

"Who's up there?" A voice from the hallway echoes through the door, "Dr. Stevens?"

"Shuck," Thomas's eyes widen, his heart beating faster when he sees Brenda's alarmed expression. "What do we do?"

She reaches over him and flicks the light off, her rasping breathing somehow louder in the dark.

"Ok, whoever is in there, come out. Campus police."

Brenda swears under her breath before darting across the room, her boot thunking against the desk too loudly, "help me with this," she whispers, yanking at the window.

"We're on the second floor."

"It's the science building," she rolls her eyes, "there's a fire escape. Come on."

"Campus police, come out of that office!" A beam of a flashlight skirts under the door just as they wrench the window open, Brenda jumping out first and landing on the fire escape with a clang. Thomas follows, struggling with the window until he sees the door handle move. Brenda is already halfway down the ladder.

"Come on, no time," she whispers, sliding down the sides of the ladder with her hands and taking the steps two at a time. Thomas catches up, landing on the ground right after her, a throb echoing through his ankles from landing hard on the cement. Something falls off of the fire escape behind them, clanging on the pavement, but he ignores it, flinching from the officer's enraged shout behind him.

And then they're running, across the back parking lot, towards the six foot chain link between the building and a copse of forest.

"I'll help you over," Thomas looks back at Brenda, a determined look etched on her face even as she's breathing hard.

"I got it, get yourself over."

Thomas scrambles at the fence just as the officer breaches the parking lot, bellowing campus police like it's actually going to stop them. He heaves himself over with a grunt and falls on the other side, rolling to his feet and looking back for Brenda. She's struggling, a dark shape in the bright beam of the flashlight, and Thomas thinks she isn't going to do it, isn't going to get a grip in time. Her toe grabs and she flings herself over the fence, landing hard, and grabbing his hand as she sprints into the forest.

They run until they're out of light, until tree roots become booby traps. She yanks him behind a tree, laughing through gasping breaths as she leans against the bark.

"That was insane."

"That was actually insane," he shakes his head, "we're going to be expelled—"

"It's a state college, they issue keys to desk assistants," she scoffs, letting go of his hand to brace her hands on her knees. "Jesus, you're fast. Where was I? Oh yeah. It's not like they have security cameras. It's not like either of us did anything."

"They're going to know—"

"How?" She stands up straight, and he can barely see her in the dark. She's all deep black hair and wide black eyes. Her teeth a flash of eerie white. "You really can't loosen up, can you?"

"Give me a minute to process this."

"What's the fun in that," she leans up and presses her lips to his cheek. "Now you should get home. They might actually be out looking for the cute guy in the blue jacket."

00000

It takes Thomas almost an hour to get home, skirting through the shadows and pausing every once in a while when he hears an officer catch someone in the area. When he finally lets himself into the fraternity, his hands are frozen numb and it takes a moment to unzip his jacket and untie his shoes. He shuffles past the kitchen towards the stairs, pausing when someone clears their throat.

"How was the date?" Newt is leaning against the counter, eating a granola bar and looking decidedly paler than normal.

"She's crazy."

"That a good thing?" He raises an eyebrow and Thomas looks at his watch.

"It's almost two in the morning, what are you doing up?"

"Headache," he shrugs, pointing at his temple. "Too many drawings."

The knock on the door makes Thomas jump and Newt looks at him curiously, pushing past to look through the peep hole. He looks back at Thomas, shaking his head, before opening the door, "Hello Officer."

"There has been a reported break-in in the science building, was everyone who lives here accounted for as of 12:45 am?"

"Everyone's here," Newt holds a hand against the cop's flashlight, "I've been up the whole time."

"We're looking for two people, a tall boy in a blue jacket and a shorter person, assumed to be a girl, in a black jacket."

"No one like that here, sir."

"Call campus police if you see anything, you have a good night." The officer turns walks back down the sidewalk and Newt shuts the door, turning back to look at Thomas with his arms crossed.

"A reported break in, huh?" He shakes his head, "that's some _date_ , Tommy."

"Thanks for covering for me," Thomas shrugs, looking at his feet like Chuck when he's in trouble. "It was her idea but—"

"Nah, you had to see it through," Newt walks past him, towards the stairs, shoving at Thomas's shoulder, "bloody hell, you're going to get yourself in trouble, you know that?"

"Thanks again."

"Yeah, you stupid shank," Newt shakes his head, glancing back one more time before disappearing from sight at the top of the stairs.

00000

"Bloody hell!" Chuck yells, dropping his controller on his lap and kicking Thomas in the back, bumping his older brother's pencil out of his hand and his textbook onto the floor. Newt laughs from the kitchen table and Thomas flushes and pokes his brother in the calf to get his attention.

"Since when are you British?"

"Since I keep losing," Chuck picks his controller back up, jaw set in childish, quivering determination. "I need to let out my frustration."

"Coming back for more?" Minho laughs, mussing Chuck's hair with a level of happy familiarity that startles Thomas. He knew Chuck was hanging out at the Glade while he was elsewhere, but it never occurred to him that his brother might actually be bonding.

"I'm gonna wipe that grin off of your shuck face." Chuck bats Minho's hand away and the older boy laughs, shaking his head and finding a new Mariokart map to play.

"What'd I say to you about that?" Thomas feels instantly uncool when Chuck rolls his eyes.

"You don't like when I say fu—"

Thomas's glare stops Chuck mid-breath and he shrugs, trying to save face. "My brother's got sensitive, greenie ears. You know how it is." He tells Minho with a sage shrug, like he's simply reporting the facts of life.

"Nah, Chuck, your brother's right for once. We don't give a shuck what you say, but shanks like Gally might get pissed," Minho grins at Thomas, "so you should listen to him, even if he has sensitive greenie ears."

"Ah, slim it," Thomas grumbles, standing form the floor and tucking his textbook under his arm.

"Where are you going?" Chuck asks, leaning forward in concentration when Minho presses start, his tongue peeking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration.

"You shanks are too loud for my sensitive ears," he shakes his head, walking to join Newt at the dining room table. Chuck shouts 'you bloody cheat!' right as Thomas sits down and he winces, "seriously, I'm sorry about him."

"Don't worry about it," Newt doesn't look quite himself. A little paler than normal, a little more unkempt. He's wearing a sweatshirt in the completely temperate kitchen and the dark circles under his eyes are grey tinged. "What? You're looking at me like I sprouted another buggin' head."

"Nothing," Thomas opens his textbook and shrugs one shoulder, "you just look like shit."

"That's an understatement," Newt pulls a bottle of Advil out of his pocket, opening it handily with one hand and tipping two into his mouth. He swallows them dry with a grimace, shaking his head. "Still got that bleeding headache, I thing I slept all of thirty minutes last night."

"Maybe you should go to the health center or something."

Newt grins, "are you worried about me, Tommy?"

"You shucking bloke!" Chuck bellows in the other room and Thomas claps a hand over his face, mouthing sorry as Newt laughs. The older boy leans back, his chair creaking as he plants his hand on the side of the doorway so he can peek into the living room.

"Oi, Chuck, 'bloke' isn't an insult."

"Oh, sorry," Chuck says brightly and Newt sits back up, shaking his head with something like fondness.

"I'm—"

"Stop shucking apologizing. He's a sweet kid," Newt laughs, shaking his head.

"He's…" Thomas sighs, running his hand through his hair. He can feel it all, the stress of Chuck showing up here, Gally's protests, his and Brenda's wild escape. Something has to give and he closes his eyes as the truth he tries not to dwell on leaks out, "he's severely lacking in role models, to be honest. He…he tends to latch onto people. He's usually repeating after me, and I'm used to it, but…I don't know."

Talking about this always makes Thomas feel older and lighter all at once, always with a healthy side serving of guilt for foisting his problem off onto someone else. He's had a decade, he should have been able to figure this out by now, his normal still should be so shucking hard.

"How long has it been just the two of you?" Newt asks quietly, like he actually wants to know, but understands Thomas might not want to tell him.

"How did you know?"

"Aside from the fact you've got the stern father act down pat, I handle the housing forms."

"Right," Thomas shakes his head, "should have guessed it was something like that."

"I get it," Newt nods, "I mean, I definitely _don't_ get it, but my parents kipped back across the Atlantic when I started school. I'm not alone, technically, but sometimes it bloody feels like it."

"Ten years," Thomas answers Newt's question, comforted by the exchange of information. Most people who ask just want to _listen_ , meaning they want to put on their best apologetic face and pat him on the back, the whole time thinking about how glad they are that it isn't them. "I was eight, Chuck was two and a half."

"I'm sorry, Tommy." Newt isn't afraid to look at him. He's not flinching from eye contact like wannabe sympathizers almost always do. His gaze is steady, warm, and Thomas doesn't feel as guilty as normal for dumping some of the anxiety out of his head. "For what it's worth, I think you're doing great."

"Are you going to see your parents over the holidays?" Thomas changes the subject, putting on his most purposefully casual smile. Newt's face falls slightly and he picks up his pencil, pouring over his textbook like it's suddenly, immediately, vitally important.

"Nah, they're going on holiday. Bora Bora or something, their anniversary is in December."

"Hey," Thomas grins, "are you staying here over Christmas?"

"Yeah, you too?"

"Well, theoretically," Thomas frowns at his homework, the page just as blank as it was an hour ago. "Assuming I survive the semester with decent grades."

"You'll be fine, greenie," Newt smiles when Chuck shouts again, something along the lines of 'bloody shanking shuck!'. "And I have to say, it's about time my vocabulary got the respect it deserves."

00000

Newt is on the edge of his seat, literally and figuratively as he watches the minigame Minho is playing in Mario Party, "Go for Luigi. He has the most coins, if you get that shank in the crane game, you'll win the shucking coin star."

"Yeah, unless Mario rolls above a 4 and gets to the ghost."

"You can't count on that."

"If I go for the trunk, I'll get ten and have a better chance at the game star."

"Do you smell that?" Newt sits up abruptly, his back straight, sniffing at the air like a bloodhound. "Oi, Frypan, something's shucking burning!" He shouts, scoffing and turning back to the game. Minho goes for the chest and Newt swears, glancing at Thomas, who still isn't allowed to play in any real context. "The one time I decide not to play like klunk, Minho shucking chickens out on me."

Newt is antsy, his feet drumming on the floor, his hip jostling against Thomas's every so often as he shifts back and forth. He doesn't look like himself, his hair wild, his eyes wide. He mentioned his headache again that morning and he looks like he hasn't slept in days.

They play two more rounds before Newt stands up, jumping to his feet and stalking towards the kitchen with a force he doesn't usually exhibit. He opens and closes the oven door. He slams the microwave. He clicks every burner on and off, the slow, steady rush of swears rising in volume until Newt is yelling again, "Frypan! Shucking hell, something in here is burning—" It cuts off abruptly. Newt releases a shuddering exhale.

He reappears in the doorway, paler than he was, hair sticking straight up, sweatshirt unzipped and threatening to fall off one shoulder. He looks at Mino carefully, eyes wide, "I need to go to the hospital."

"What?" Thomas jumps to his feet, looking at Newt for the injury, for whatever is making him so sure he needs the hospital. He looks fine, fine but unhinged, his expression wild and empty and wrong on his face.

"Shucking hell," Minho seems to get it immediately, whatever Newt is talking about, jumping to his feet, not bothering to turn off the console.

"Nothing is burning," Newt shakes his head. "It smells like smoke but nothing's burning, it's just like last time, bloody hell." He deflates slightly, crumpling, his head lolling forward like it's too heavy for his neck. "My head's been hurting for a week, I can't. It's…"

"Come on, Newt," Minho fumbles his car keys out of his pocket, looping a friendly arm around Newt's back and leading him towards the door. "It's probably just Frypan's last klunk dinner. It always smells shucking awful in here anyway."

"What's going on?" Thomas follows them towards the door.

"Later, Greenie." Minho glances back over his shoulder. "I'll tell you later."

It's two hours before Minho returns, paler than he was when he left and noticeably alone. He sighs and looks honestly relieved to see Thomas.

"Come upstairs Greenie, I don't want to spread Newt's shucking dirty laundry all over the place."

Thomas follows Minho upstairs to his room, one of the many bedrooms in the house Thomas has never been in. It's messy, in an organized sort of way, indecipherable stacks of papers everywhere, folded clothes on the desk instead of in the dresser. Minho sits on his bed and gestures at the desk chair, running his hand through his hair and exhaling.

"What's going on with Newt?"

"We met in high school," Minho tosses a quarter into the air and catches it again, stuffing it in his pocket and tapping his feet on the ground. "He was a year older than me, but had to retake a few classes because he spent so much of his Freshman year in the hospital."

"What's wrong with him?"

"Cancer." The older boy laughs, a gravelly laugh that's anything but cheerful. "And it's back."

It's something he's never thought of before. He's seen so many people pass through, so many people skip through his foster houses, so many people disappear from his life, but he's never thought of any of them being _sick_.

The bald, sad kids on the TV have always been separate from his struggles, a different plain of existence that he couldn't comprehend.

And the fact that it's Newt. Newt, nice, helpful Newt. Newt who doesn't like it when he's scared, Newt who constantly tries to help everyone. Newt who doesn't deserve anything but the best from anybody. Thomas didn't realize how much he cared until this second.

Minho taps his temple, "in his brain."

"Shuck," Thomas whispers it, but it sounds like a megaton explosion. "That's—"

"It's not shucking good," Minho lays back, staring at the ceiling and kicking his shoes off. "Those crank doctors want to keep him over night for tests."

Thomas wants to ask what a crank is. He wants to ask how Newt knew he needed to go in so suddenly. He wants to ask a million things but none of them can make it past the unanswerable, the 'why Newt?' pooled and swirling in his brain.

* * *

 **So much just happened. Like, literally everything just happened.**


	4. Chapter 4

Thomas wakes up in time for class but doesn't go, instead finding himself sitting at the kitchen table, cutting a toaster waffle into smaller and smaller pieces with the side of his fork. Minho trots down the stairs a few minutes after Thomas's class would have started, raising a confused eyebrow.

"Aren't you supposed to be in class?"

"Right," Thomas thinks again of all of his unanswered, unanswerable questions. "Are you uh…Are you going to get Newt?"

"Yeah, I just got his text."

"So he's ok, or?"

Minho gives him a sympathetic sort of steely face, "do you want me to ask him if you can come? I'm not going to shucking invite you along, but—"

"I'm not big on hospitals," Thomas shakes his head, tapping his fork against the pulp of waffle on his plate. "But, I don't know, should I see if he wants to hang out this afternoon or something?"

"Just a second…" Minho types something out, getting a response immediately. "Just come with me, you can wait in the car. Newt wants you to."

That sentence is somehow convincing, and Thomas checks his pockets for his wallet and phone before following Minho out the front door.

"You don't have to come in," Minho digs his keys out of his pocket, "I think he's pretty eager to get out of there. His exact words were 'kidnap Tommy and hurry'."

"I'm making your job easy, then."

"Yeah," Minho stops outside of his car, a shoddy dark blue sedan with a scratched rear bumper. "Just…I don't know why he's so ok with you coming along. I'm not going to question it, because he's my friend, and because he needs all the support he can shucking get right now but…but if he's not right about you, I'll kick your shank ass."

Thomas wants to ask about last time, about how Minho knows so much, about a million things. He nods, tucking his hands deeper into his pockets, "I get it."

"I won't just kick your ass, I'll make you wish you never had an ass for me to kick."

"I got it."

"Ok," Minho unlocks the car and Thomas climbs in the passenger seat. The drive to the hospital is short, just a few miles on the highway closest to campus and Thomas's discomfort grows like a living entity inside of him as they pull up to an overhang.

He hasn't been to a hospital more than a few times, he fought tooth and nail to avoid it when he was 14 and sprained his ankle in that race. All he can think is that his mom went into a similar building through identical doors, but never came out.

Newt, on the other hand, rushes out as soon as they park, climbing into the backseat without question and slamming the door behind him. He taps Minho's shoulder, "drive."

"You sound like you're escaping."

"They're trying to convince me to stay," Newt says a little breathlessly, and Thomas can't help but notice how pale he is, the three or four bandaids along his forearm, like they took more blood than they should have. They took his Mom's blood, in droves, and when Thomas was eight, that was the whole evil of it. He saw his mom, his all-powerful, all giving, all wonderful mother reduced to something pale and dying in increments of stolen blood.

"Yeah?" Minho asks the question in a gentle voice not all his own, driving too quickly from the parking lot.

"There's good news and there's bloody bad news," Newt's hand lands on Thomas's shoulder, a silent sort of invitation to the conversation. "They still have my file, the MRI is similar, and they can update an existing treatment plan," he clears his throat, "but they're going to start pumping me full of poison tomorrow, so I have a few months' worth of fun to have all at once."

"Poison?" Thomas is suddenly alarmed, looking back at Newt, eyebrows furrowed.

"Chemo," Newt backtracks, a little more somber, "problem is, it poisons buggin' all of you at once."

"This is perfect," Minho pulls his wallet out at a stoplight, handing it to Newt. He seems to know where he's going, and Thomas texts Brenda, hoping she takes notes in Chemistry today and that she'll share them. "Check it out. New ID."

Newt laughs, and he sounds like himself, "Richard Pennsylvania, born March 1978." He hands it to Thomas, who wrinkles his nose at Minho, smiled and posed, next to obviously fake information.

"This also says you weigh 140 pounds," Thomas laughs, an odd sort of relief pulsing through him when Newt joins, clapping him on the shoulder. How can things feel so normal, so suddenly, when they're anything but?

"Mad gains, bro," Minho flexes.

"And it says you're 37 shucking years old. No one is going to believe you're 37."

"That's racist," Minho nods certainly.

"How the shucking hell is that racist?" Newt tucks the ID back into Minho's wallet and tosses it into the cup holder. He's leaning between the seats, not wearing a seatbelt, and Thomas wonders whether he should have a fake ID too. He wonders what he signed up for, but somehow doesn't care as much as he should, because Newt wants him here. Minho's warning is still fresh in his mind, and he wonders what that means.

"It's not, but that's what I'm going to say to them if they question it."

"Or you could just, you know, not risk your neck with such a bloody stupid plan, considering I am actually 21." Newt reaches between the two front seats to fiddle with the radio, changing the station and turning it up. It's a song Thomas doesn't recognize, a song with a backbone to its beat, obviously for pumping up in some way.

Minho looks back at Newt, eyebrows raised, "but you're the one always making a shucking stink about how we'll get in trouble for getting babyfaced greenies drunk."

"Tommy isn't so babyfaced," Newt pats his cheek.

"I was talking about myself, obviously," Minho shakes his head. "So I'm going to a liquor store?"

Newt punches Minho in the back of the shoulder, "but you bloody shanks are paying. If I'm going to break the shucking law, I'm not buggin' paying for it."

00000

"They said it was 'unusually aggressive' and 'inoperable'," Newt relays his diagnosis, sitting on the edge of his bed and picking at the wrapper of his beer. It's strange to see Newt, who's normally so ready to listen, obviously bursting with the need to _talk_ and Thomas finds himself looking anywhere but right at him.

He takes a sip of his own beer, and it's like being sixteen again, nicking one out of the fridge with a wayward foster brother. It feels wrong, but makes him feel mature, maybe mature enough that he can listen to Newt talk about the intruder making itself at home in his head.

"They're shocked I went this long without noticing it, apparently it should have started hurting months ago but…I guess I'm used to a bit of chronic pain," he glances at his ankle and Minho stands abruptly, patting Newt hard enough on the shoulder that the blond bounces slightly on his mattress.

"No, we aren't doing this," he stalks to Newt's clock radio and turns it on, flicking through the stations until he finds one playing loud, static-filled rock, and turns it up. "We aren't going to have a shucking depressing, klunk-athon. This is not the end of the world."

"Who said it was?" Newt snips, and it's from someone else again, some angry, sullen person hidden within the guy Thomas knows.

"There are millions of fun things you can do even if you have cancer."

"It's not a bloody _if_ ," Newt takes a swig of his beer, leaning back against the wall against his bed and curling his knees to his chest.

"Well, you have cancer, we're still going to have fun." Minho glares at Newt from ruining his point before looking at Thomas for help. "Right, Greenie? Plenty of fun to be had that Newt doesn't need his brain for."

"We can still play videogames," Thomas offers, "Mario Party isn't going to win itself."

"I never win anyway," Newt rolls his eyes, and he's never sounded bitter before now. He drains his beer and reaches for another.

There have been a handful of parties at the glade since Thomas moved in, and he avoided all but one because running and school got in the way, but at the one he attended, he never saw Newt go near the spiked punch bowl.

"We can play laser tag," Minho sits on Newt's desk, kicking his feet up on the edge of Thomas's chair. "We can go skydiving. We can…"

"We could go bowling." Thomas tries to help and Minho pats him on the shoulder.

"When have I ever been interested in any of those things?" Normally, drawing a smile out of Newt is the easiest thing in the world. Right now he's stony. Stony and bleary and tired, his hair overgrown and sticking up on his head.

"You could get laid," Minho jumps to his feet again, pacing across the center of the room. "Why didn't I think of that before? It's the easiest thing in the world, who would say no to a shank with cancer?"

"That's messed up," Thomas blurts, shrinking back when Minho glares at him.

"At least someone is halfway buggin' sane," Newt shakes his head, "thanks for that, Tommy. And plus, in a few months, I'll be bloody bald, and that cancels out the whole cancer thing anyway."

"There are plenty of bald shanks with plenty of game," Minho paces a little more quickly, unused to being a comforting influence. This is another thing that's going the wrong way. Newt is the guy Thomas would expect to drive someone to the hospital, Minho is the one to put them there. But every stiff line of Minho's back shows how hard he's trying to _fix_ the situation. "The Rock, Jason Statham…Captain Picard."

"None of them are puking their bloody guts out, but thanks for the inspiration."

"That just adds to the whole cancer appeal!" Minho points at Thomas, "right?"

"I mean…it's not an awful—it is awful, but it would probably work."

"You were supposed to be on my side," Newt says it with a surprising amount of vitrol, standing up and pacing past Minho. "What are we going to shucking do? Shave my head and just send me out into the world with a sign around my buggin' neck that says 'Shag me, I'm dying?'"

"Hey wait," Thomas cocks his head, "that's not the worst idea."

"That is literally the worst bloody idea I've ever had," Newt laughs but it's not real. It's harsh and gritty and it rakes across Thomas's chest like sandpaper.

"No, the head shaving," Thomas looks to Minho, who looks clueless but eager for an idea. "You shave it off before the chemo makes you lose it. It's…a big middle finger in cancer's face."

"You want me to shave my head?" Newt takes a long, pensive sip of his beer.

"Let's do it," Minho nods.

"Ok," Newt shakes his head, something like his normal smile flirting with the corners of his mouth, impulsive and determined. "Let's do it."

It takes Minho ten minutes to find his clippers and they meet in the bathroom, Newt standing with his hands braced on the sink and leaning his head forward.

"Ready?" Minho fires up his clippers, pressing the button and making them rev like a miniature engine. Newt takes a swig of his beer, looking straight ahead into the mirror, paler than normal. "Come on, Newt. Choose bald before bald chooses you."

And this is all so overwhelmingly, ridiculously insane that Thomas can't get around it. They're in the bathroom, too drunk for a Thursday, because Newt starts chemo in the morning and apparently intentional cancer poison and intentional liver poison don't mix. And the frank reality of the situation hits Thomas in the chest like an anvil. Newt has brain cancer. Newt is going to shave his head. Newt.

 _Newt_.

"Tommy, you do it." Newt finishes his beer and points, "I don't bloody trust him. He's going to stick me with a Mohawk or something."

"I've never used clippers before in my life," Thomas shakes his head.

"You push the buggin' button and shave my head."

"No, this is better," Minho shoves the clippers into Thomas's hand and pulls out his phone. "This should be on video. For posterity."

"I'll film it," Thomas holds the clippers at arm's length like they're poisonous, regretting his last beer and worrying strangely about cutting off Newt's ear.

"No, you shank, you're shaving my head."

"I don't—"

"Here," Newt turns to him with a strange, manic sort of light in his eyes, snatching the clippers away and jamming his thumb into the button before dragging the whirring blades straight back the middle of his head. Tufts of blonde fall to the floor, one sticking to the tip of Newt's drunken, pink nose. "I'll get you started."

Minho claps a hand over his mouth and half stifles a laugh, "good call, good call."

Newt hands the clippers back to Thomas, his fingers wrapping the other boy's around the plastic handle and holding them there. "And I expect to have two ears when you're done."

"No pressure," Thomas laughs, looking nervously at Minho, who shrugs, a placid sort of smirk on his face, like he was right about the unlikely outcome of a board game. "Lean over the sink," he steps forward, hand on the back of Newt's neck as he positions him above the porcelain bowl. Newt is swaying slightly, and Thomas feels better if it's alcohol rather than nerves as he braces his hips against the blonde's to help hold him still.

Thomas fakes dragging the clippers through soft blonde twice before shifting, his elbow resting on Newt's shoulders.

"I don't—"

"Slim it, Tommy, it's not rocket science." Newt grumbles, leaning on Thomas a little harder, his elbows braced on the edges of the sink.

It hits Thomas strangely that he likes Newt's hair, that it might be something he'll miss. That Newt might look funny without it, that at some point in the last two months he's developed an internal concept of Newt looking funny.

"Fine," Thomas runs his fingers through the back of Newt's hair, lining the clippers up with the base of it and swiping upwards until the blades start to jam. "There," he cleans the blade over the sink and goes again, clearing a swath of pale plush across the entirety of the nape of Newt's neck. "You'll be bald in no time."

"Tell me about it," Newt grumbles, his shoulder becoming heavier against Thomas's stomach.

Thomas drags the clippers higher, his knuckles brushing across the newly trimmed hair. And maybe it's because he's drunk, or maybe it's because he'd kill for Newt to laugh, but he laughs, running his fingertips across the swatch of short hair, "you're _fuzzy_."

"I'm what?" Newt runs a hand up the back of his neck, "you better not be leaving a— _Oh_."

"Right?" Thomas rubs the hair the opposite of the way it had been laying and it pushes back against his fingers, plush and oddly entertaining. "Minho, feel this, it's so soft—"

Minho is staring at him like he's halfway through growing another head.

"Do the bloody rest of it, I feel all uneven," Newt is still laughing, his shoulder entirely too warm, as Thomas drags the clippers over the rest of his head, the last shock of blonde finally falling off into the sink with a flourish.

"There we go," Thomas laughs when Newt stands up, haphazard curls around his ears.

"It looks that shucking awful, doesn't it?"

"No, I've just got to clean it up…hold still," Thomas chastises, resting one hand on Newt's cheek and running the clippers in careful curved motions around his ears. "And other one...there."

Newt turns to look in the mirror, his dreamy, drunk smile fading instantly, "never thought I'd see _this_ shank again."

"Not for long, buddy," Minho puts his phone away, patting Newt on the back and running a cursory hand over his blond, fuzzy head. "That is soft." He gives Thomas a meaningful, skeptical look that makes Thomas wish he had another beer.

00000

Newt keeps drinking once he's free of his hair, fumbling under his bed for a half-full bottle of rum and taking a gulp out of the bottle. He laughs when Thomas winces at his own sip, taking the bottle back and cradling it under his arm while he leans back, head thunking against the wall.

"At least this time I can get bloody drunk," Newt's voice drags strangely, thickly, the vowels longer and the consonants softer in his current state of inebriation.

"This time?" Thomas cocks his head, sitting down on Newt's desk chair and accepting another sip of rum, only because it doesn't seem wise to leave Newt with the full bottle.

"The night before chemo is shucking worse than the chemo, buggin' anticipating all that klunk," Newt sighs, suddenly pensive, the slightly dopey grin gone from his face in an instant. Thomas can see more of his eyebrows without hair in the way, and it's a different sort of expressive, his face governed by sharp quirks and twitches. "I know Minho told you to slim it, but I don't care. He seems to think the world will shucking explode if anyone mentions it to me."

"He uh," Thomas looks at the open door, wondering if he should close it, "he didn't tell me much. Just that you'd been in remission. And it was in high school."

"I was fourteen," Newt stares at his feet, "t's why my parents moved here. I had bloody headaches no one could figure out. My sense of smell went haywire and suddenly I couldn't taste anything. Mum caught wind of some specialist and packed us up before I could blink, and they found it on their first MRI. A horrible spider of a thing they couldn't cut out; it was so wrapped around everything."

Thomas doesn't know what to say. None of his thoughts seem right, the questions too obtuse. He remembers hearing a name for that type of tumor, but thinking of something that nefarious infecting Newt's brain makes his mouth go dry. He wants to change the subject, he wants to hear all of the gory details, he wants utter silence and to scream at the top of his lungs. It's one of those things that just doesn't seem fair, like some angry God rolled a loaded die.

"What, Tommy? You aren't going to bombard me with questions?" Newt grins again, a sort of grin that reminds Thomas he's stretched out across his bed, a grin he can't make sense of. "The one time you decide to be fucking polite."

The swear is jarring in a way it shouldn't be, but after months of hearing Newt toned down by Glader slang, it sounds wrong. Forceful in a way that 'shucking' never does.

"What's chemo actually like?"

"Hell," Newt lays back, the bottle of rum dangling off of the bed, still clutched tight in his fist. "I used to sleep 20 hours a day and still be bloody exhausted. I couldn't eat shit, even if I'd have wanted to, the inside of my mouth was so shuck covered in sores. If I did manage to eat, I'd just throw it up. My eyebrows fell out and I looked like a buggin' alien. And then there are the pills to fix the shuck the chemo breaks, and they all have side effects," Newt rolls to face him, like he's gaging his reaction, "you feel insane, and you look insane, and most of the time, you can't sort out medication from the monster eating your mind.

"You know, I got a full bloody bill of health, but I should have known they didn't get it all. There are holes, everywhere. I remember riding a bike, but I don't remember learning. I remember being angry, but don't remember what about. There was a time about six months later when I forgot the word 'elephant' and it struck me, I couldn't remember going to the zoo ever in my life. Minho went with me that weekend," Newt looks at his hands, taking another sip of rum, "I should have known, I should have said something, but I just wanted to be _fucking_ normal." He laughs, "Good that. A _normal_ fifteen year old that doesn't remember what a shucking elephant is."

"Newt, I'm sorry—"

"S'not your bloody fault," he scoffs. "And the hospitals. Don't get me started on the shank doctors with their stethoscopes they have to keep in the bloody freezer. Always poking. T's like you're not human anymore, you're just a broken _thing_."

Thomas gets a flash then, a woman who's face he can barely picture, gaunt in a hospital bed, telling him it'll be ok, that the doctors are helping. Thomas remembers Chuck's hand in his, chubby and sweaty. He remembers the doctors talking like he wasn't there, like his mom wasn't there.

"Where'd you go?"

Thomas blinks and Newt is leaning forward, elbows on his knees, as focused as Thomas has seen him since he came home dazed from the hospital. "Just then. You disappeared on me."

"Uh," Thomas rubs the back of his neck, "my mom. I didn't like her doctors much either." He shakes his head, "I—I don't even know what it was, I don't remember her much. I was eight when she died."

"'M sorry, Tommy."

"Not your fault," Thomas echoes.

"D'you ever wish you could stop time?" Newt leans forward, close enough Thomas can see the line on his forehead where his hair protected his skin from the sun, a pale strip fading into golden blonde stubble. "Just…click a bloody pause button and breathe for a minute?"

Newt smells like rum. Rum and beer and something else, something anxious. Chuck shivering while some foster father screams downstairs. Thomas acts on instinct, leaning forward and wrapping his arms around Newt's shoulders, thumping him once on the back. Newt drops the bottle, his arms closing around Thomas's back, a distinct, heartbreaking sniff far too close to Thomas's ear.

It should be awkward, Newt crying on him, his tears dripping down Thomas's neck like scalding little rivers, but it feels like something he's done a million times. Thomas stands up, taking Newt with him, rubbing hopefully soothing circles on the older boy's back. The hug lasts altogether too long, their breathing finally synchronizing as Newt calms down.

Newt sighs, stepping back, his eyes closed. "Unpause."

00000


	5. Chapter 5

Newt snores.

That is, for some reason, the first thought in Thomas's mind as he wakes up on the couch, groggy and cold except for the shoulder overlapping Newt's. The older boy's snores are soft, almost wispy, not loud enough to be disruptive. Thomas realizes he can feel them, pulsing against his arm, rhythmic and somehow distracting.

He sits up, going from cold to freezing as he blinks twice, taking in the living room which looks so different when it's empty at three in the morning. The darkness outside is oppressive, like a lead blanket, a single star visible between the blinds. The TV is off, the coffee table is back in place and littered with dirty plates. Newt is curled up in the corner of the couch, his head lolling back against the armrest. His arm is stretched along the back of the couch, and Thomas can feel the ghost of it, especially chilled along his shoulders.

Newt snorts in his sleep, stirring slightly, his arm falling from the back of the couch as his legs stretch out as far as they can, pushing against Thomas's legs. Thomas shivers, the warmth of Newt's feet reminding him how cold he is as he plants a hand against the couch by his knees, moving to stand up as quietly as possible. Newt's hand stops him, curling in his hair, the touch too calculated to be accidental.

Thomas grins, looking at his friend, wondering who the lucky lady is. It's only right, with everything that's going on, that Newt should be getting some. He clears his throat and tries to imagine what Newt's dream girl would sound like, whispering in something hopefully different from his usual tone, "Newt…"

"Mmph, Tommy," the blonde boy grumbles, unfurling slightly as he sits up, running his hand back through his hair. He blinks, realization dawning on his face like an early sunrise, "oh. Tommy."

"I guess I was too loud," Thomas laughs, resisting a shiver at the other boy's fingers curling gently against the nape of his neck. "I was hoping to figure out who you were reaching for."

"Oh," Newt's arm drops into his lap, "sorry about that," he wipes his face, "what time is it?"

Thomas glances at his watch, "3:07 am."

"I didn't think I'd fall asleep," Newt yawns, scratching his head, blinking hard and shifting to sit up straight.

"I can't believe no one woke us up," Thomas looks around at the general _use_ of every surface of the room. The tennis ball on the windowsill, leftover from some haphazard game of catch. A few textbooks on the ground, homework abandoned for the night half-finished next to them. The room was crowded when he fell asleep, and it's strange that it would have emptied quietly enough to let him stay that way.

"You can't?" Newt laughs and leans back against the couch, paler than normal, and it makes Thomas worry in a way that doesn't quite make sense. "Of course you can't," he shakes his head and rubs his hand across his face again, and from the slow drooping squint of his profile, Thomas can tell he's struggling to stay awake. "It's bloody freezing in here."

"I'm not looking forward to how cold my bed is going to be," Thomas doesn't know why he says it, and more importantly, he doesn't know why the fact that sentence just fell out of his mouth makes him flush. He rubs his palms up and down his arms, trying to scare away the goosebumps and Newt looks at him with a crooked half-smile.

"Mario Party?"

"It's three in the morning," Thomas laughs, tottering on that line between exhausted and so tired he doesn't care.

"I know for a fact you don't have class until noon, so slim it and play one measly little game with me," Newt holds up his finger, "we can play twenty turns. You can choose the map."

"I have practice tomorrow," the excuse is half-hearted and Thomas twiddles his thumbs, his skin almost grayscale in the dim room. Someone left the hallway light on and his eyes flick towards the bulb, stinging slightly at the brightness.

"Running is far less miserable when completely exhausted."

"I don't think it's miserable in the first place," Thomas shoves the older boy's shoulder, more concerned than he should be at the chill of Newt's skin. He wishes he'd brought his space heater to school, the one he used to keep at the foot of his and Chuck's bed in that horrible foster home where none of the windows shut tight where they spent the coldest winter on record.

"Right, because you're an insane shank."

"And you're a horrible influence," Thomas rolls to his feet, stretching against a brewing knot in his back and shuffling forward to turn on the console and drag it out into the middle of the room so that the controllers reach the couch. He hands Newt his original vintage green one and sits down with the blue one that Minho never lets him use. "One game. Peach's Birthday Cake, 20 turns."

"That shucking map?"

"Yes, I like that map."

"There's no ghost, it's a buggin' joke."

"Well, I'll be more reasonable at any other hour of the day. Are we playing, or not?"

Newt sighs and selects his character on the loading screen, reaching behind Thomas to grab the blanket wadded on the back of the couch. He tucks his feet up under him, stretching out across half of the middle cushion and raising an eyebrow at Thomas, "aren't you cold?"

"I'll live for 20 turns," Thomas shrugs.

Newt selects 35 and tosses the blanket across Thomas's lap too, his eyes fixed on the screen, "so, Peach's shanking Birthday Cake," he shakes his head, "we should have never encouraged this Princess Peach obsession."

"She's been lucky for me," Thomas laughs, feeling only slightly strange as he curls his own legs towards the middle of the couch. His feet brush against Newt's, which are basically blocks of ice, and he stretches out a little further, worried that Newt needs legitimate warming up.

He wonders if it's a symptom, or whether it's just Newt, or whether it has something to do with being so skinny. He wonders why he's so concerned about it, remembering his confusion the weekend before at Teresa grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair when he was cold. He didn't care, he wasn't using it but…but it wasn't instinct like this is.

"You beat Minho once, at a mini game that was nothing but bloody luck."

"So you're just keeping me awake to heckle me?" Thomas kicks Newt's hip gently under the blanket, his foot brushing against stomach left bare by Newt's apparently rucked up shirt.

"Shuck Tommy, your feet are like ice!"

"And you're so warm," Thomas jokes, curling his toes against his friend's stomach, for some reason not mentioning that Newt's are colder.

"I'm going to kick your shank arse."

"You're especially British when you're irritated."

After five turns, they're even with each other, a few coins ahead of both computers. Thomas takes his turn, rolls a ten, and lands even with Newt, a few spaces behind the star. "Ha, I caught up," he turns to gloat, but Newt is asleep, head tucked into the crook of the couch, jaw slightly slack.

Thomas thinks about waking him up, about jiggling his legs, which are so inexorably tangled at this point, he couldn't get up without waking him. But it means something if Newt would rather play video games at three in the morning instead of sleeping, doesn't it? He wonders if Newt has nightmares. Thomas used to lay awake at night, trying to convince himself to be lulled by Chuck's even breathing until the sun came up and he could justify escaping on his morning run. He can't imagine what that must be like to do it alone, laying in an empty room with nothing but the whispers of the walls for comfort.

He reaches for the TV remote, wincing when the motion jostles Newt slightly, and turns the TV off with a click of static. Newt is snoring again, soft, whispery, and it's comforting as Thomas lets his head loll back against the arm of the couch. He drifts off almost instantly.

00000

"They have rooms!" Gally's irritated voice is just about the last thing Thomas would want to wake up to, ahead of stuff like armies of cannibal psychos and fiery explosions, but honestly, not by much.

"Yeah, and so do you, so go to it if this bugs you so much." Alby is closer than Gally, picking up and closing what sounds like a heavy textbook. Thomas shifts slightly, confused at a solid weight on his stomach, warmer and less comfortable than he ever is in bed.

"First Newbie gets a place on the couch, then he gets to hog the shucking couch all night," Gally huffs into the room, slamming a textbook closed himself and clomping back up the stairs, muttering something about a "stupid, lucky shank" under his breath.

Thomas rubs his eyes as soon as he's sure Gally's gone, sitting up slightly and squinting against the sun streaming through the window. Newt's foot is in the middle of his chest and the older boy is still out cold, his face hidden from the light by a deep shadow in the corner of the couch arm.

Minho peeks around the corner with his phone held out like a periscope, his smile crumbling as soon as he makes eye contact with Thomas, "ah shuck, you shanks are awake."

"And if I weren't?" Thomas sits up further, trying to free his foot from where it's wedged between Newt's side and the couch, wincing when Newt grumbles in his sleep, wrinkling his nose.

"It's adorable," Minho shrugs, "I was taking a picture."

"Do you need something to keep under your pillow?" Newt mumbles, rubbing his eyes and sitting up, "because I'm sure I can get you a better shot of Tommy."

"I need both of you ugly shanks under my pillow, to remind me how lucky I have it," Minho grins, tucking his phone back in his pocket and shooting Thomas a meaningful look that is fully lost on him. "Anyway. It's like, ten, don't you have class at 11, Newt?"

"Not going," the blonde stretches his arms over his head, twisting to sit normally and fixing his shirt with a pink flush that's probably from the rush of heat escaping from under the blanket. It's still cold in the room and he crosses his arms, rolling his neck back and forth. Thomas is also regretting sleeping without a pillow and he rubs the back of his neck.

"What class is it?"

"Does it matter?" Newt scoffs, looking out the window at the bright sun reflecting off of the late November snow that's formed a rigid, uniform crust across the ground. "I'm going for a walk," he stands up, quavering a bit on his bad ankle and glancing at Thomas. His expression darkens and he touches his side, tugging down on his shirt and sighing.

"Do you want us to come?" Minho frowns, shooting Thomas a meaningful look that manages to not communicate any meaning.

"Nah, I just…want some time alone."

"Because I don't want to go to Calculus, and I know Thomas doesn't give a shit about organic chemistry."

"Nah, slim it," Newt waves them off, skirting eye contact with Thomas and running his hand through his hair. It's already in disarray, flat where he was laying on it and sticking up insanely everywhere else. "You shanks need to pick up my slack in the Glade GPA."

"No pressure," Minho punches Newt on the arm, "text me later."

"Yeah," Newt walks too directly from the room, his ankle stiff and reminding Thomas too keenly of the still warm spot it was resting on his chest. He scratches his front, suddenly feeling awkward as Minho turns to him with too much focus.

"He hasn't been sleeping right. I swear, he shucking wakes me up three times a night going to the bathroom," there's genuine concern beneath Minho's smirk, "I don't know why I chose the room right next door to the john."

Thomas shrugs, because the bubble of concern blooming in his chest is overstepping something he can't describe. He stands up and stretches, adjusting the waistband of his sweatpants on his hips.

"I thought you would have noticed, given how we all just saw you cuddling him—"

"We weren't _cuddling_ ," he frowns, because the word sits wrong but feels right, like a stolen sweatshirt exactly in his size. "We were playing videogames and fell asleep."

"Right," Minho shakes his head, looking at Thomas in a way that seems to drill through him, "don't mess with him right now, dude. That's messed up."

"I'm not messing—"

"Slim it, Thomas," Minho narrows his eyes, "this kind of shuck always happens, I was there last time, random shanks would show up at the hospital with cupcakes and toys, but they were just because he was sick."

"I don't care that's he's sick—"

"That's even more messed up," Minho sighs, "look, I know this is none of my shucking business but—think about what you're doing." He's silent for a long moment, his expression lifting slightly, "I'm going on a run around 3, are you in?"

"Yeah," Thomas nods absent-mindedly, everything else Minho said sitting like a brick of lead in his chest.

00000

"Hey!"

Thomas flinches at the hand landing heavily on his shoulder, still warped out of shape by a night curled on half of the couch. Brenda appears beside him, "sorry, didn't mean to scare you."

"You didn't _scare_ me."

"Fine, startle, whatever." She adjusts her bag on her shoulder, "I just haven't seen you much lately. And you missed class last week and I was just worried about you, I guess."

"I'm fine," Thomas feels like he should make some childish joke about her _liking_ him, or like he should invite her out to do something but…but after his conversation with Minho that morning, all he can think about is Newt.

"Ok, Miserable Molly," she breathes deep, like she's composing herself, "so I was wondering, if you really are fine, if you might want to do something a bit more typical than breaking and entering."

Thomas laughs a dry, mechanical laugh, his mind a million miles away.

"Or something less typical. We could go jump off a bridge."

"What?"

"Are you even paying attention?" She laughs but she looks hurt, stopping with her hands on her hips. She's too small to be so loud, the crowd behind them splitting easily around her like they never really do for Thomas.

"Sorry, I just had a late night."

"Doing what?" She asks, genuinely curious, walking along with him again. "Because if it was chemistry, you're slipping. It only took me an hour to do the reading."

"Just…family stuff," he glosses over it, his chest oddly warm when he thinks about the glade as his family, what they'd say if they knew. "You know."

"You don't want to talk about it, I'm not stupid," she reaches for his hand and he lets her, trying to focus on the warmth of her fingers, the way they fit into his. He squeezes and lets go after a few seconds, hoping she's not offended.

"I'm just a little…distracted. You know." It's unspoken that Newt doesn't want his problem broadcasted everywhere and the last thing Thomas is going to do is break that vein of trust.

"Yeah," she shakes the comment off, shrugging, "yeah, it happens—"

"Yo Greenie!" Minho jumps—literally—into their conversation from the grassy hill beside them, arm over Thomas's shoulders, "we've got to go."

"Is N—is everything ok?"

Minho looks at him carefully, "he's fine. This is good news."

"Good news?" Brenda steps towards them, her grin superficial and determined. "Brenda, by the way."

Minho shakes her hand, "unfortunately it's also private news, so Thomas will see you later."

"He can speak for himself."

"I can," he shrugs Minho's arm off of his shoulders, feeling like he's standing at the cusp of two colliding worlds that weren't ever really supposed to meet. Brenda is supposed to stay in Chemistry, snarking about orbitals and climbing maple trees. "But I will see you later. I sort of need the good news."

"Yeah, you work on your mood, grumpy," she pops onto her tiptoes and kisses his cheek, waving goodbye and walking back the way she came.

"Look at you," Minho starts back up the grassy hill, the muddy shortcut to the glade. "Getting adorable kisses on the cheek."

"It's nothing," Thomas resists the sudden urge to wipe his cheek, "we're just friends. What's the good news?"

"Right!" Minho's eyes light up, "Newt went to the doctor and they gave him a medical marijuana card. He said it was pathetic to smoke alone so we're invited."

"But we can't do that," Thomas looks at his running shoes, thinks back to being lectured about drugs at the beginning of the season. "They'll test us."

"I looked into it and since we're division II, they would only test four student athletes who aren't football players," Minho falters, "and we're not _that_ unlucky, plus, I think he shucking needs this right now, dude." The last point is hushed, Minho leaning in slightly like someone is listening, "and I meant what I said this morning but…but he's way shucking happier when you're around, alright?"

It's strange to see Newt being taken care of after spending so long taking care of everyone. Minho speaks like he was always primed to step up and it's inspiring enough that Thomas nods.

"I just want to help."

Minho nods, "well, right now, apparently that means getting high."

It brings a levity back to the situation and when they get home, they're both laughing, their noses cold as they hang their jackets on the hook by the front door. Frypan appears from the kitchen with a plate of cookies and Minho grins.

"Oh honey, you baked."

"Very funny," the boy rolls his eyes, "they're for Newt, alright? It's weird if I give them to him, because I'm not supposed to know but…you know."

"Yeah, we got it," Thomas takes the plate and Frypan eyes him suspiciously for a moment.

"Newt likes the greenie," Minho fills in, "leave it be."

"The cookies are for Newt," Frypan restates after an odd, tense moment, returning to the kitchen.

Minho and Thomas find Newt in his room, the bed neatly made, the desk covered in stacked books, and the smoke detector detached from the ceiling, dangling by two wires. The window is open and Newt is sitting at his desk, looking more than a little apprehensive, and his eyes light up when he sees them. Thomas wants to ask where he went on his walk that morning, if it helped, why he left so suddenly, but his curiosity is redirected by the bag of green bud and the box of rolling papers on the desk.

"I don't suppose either of you shanks have any idea how to do this," his eyes look a little glassy if Thomas looks for it, the room slightly skunky. There's a poorly rolled joint on the desk blackened and burned. "I tried, but it was bloody awful, too much paper or something."

"Thomas?" Minho claps him on the shoulder and pushes him forward.

"Why would you think I know how?"

"Street cred," Minho nods, "you're a shucking foster kid, you must have lived with some pot smoking delinquents."

"Stereotyping," Thomas shoves Minho off, setting the cookies on the desk, "from Frypan, by the way. And how did you know?"

"I let it slip," Newt looks so sad, so genuinely apologetic and so much younger with his close shaved head that Thomas can't find the idea of getting angry anywhere in his head. "Sorry, Tommy."

"Nah, it's—I do know how to do this," he shrugs, "or I've seen it done, and it didn't look that hard."

"Stereotypes exist for a reason," Minho sits down on Newt's bed, feet folded under him.

"Yeah, and you almost failed Calculus in high school," Newt rolls his eyes. "And please, Tommy, go ahead, because I'm clueless."

It takes him three tries to roll something tight enough to resemble the joints he remembers foster siblings stashing in pillow cases, and two tries for Newt to get a good inhale from it. He coughs at the smoke, his eyes watering as he holds it towards Thomas.

"There's no," cough, "buggin' way I'm doing this alone."

And it's the same thing that made Thomas steal pizza that makes him take a deep breath from the end of the crookedly rolled cigarette.

"Shuck," he coughs too, but less than Newt who probably inhaled more than enough paper smoke from his failed attempt.

"Let me in on this," Minho takes the joint away and relights it with the lighter from the desk, taking his own breath. He handles it better than either of them, but his eyes water as he exhales a mouthful of smoke.

Newt reaches out for one of the cookies, "I know it's probably psychological, but these look great."

Minho hands him the joint and he takes a deep breath like this is typical, like it's something he does every day and lets it out with a laugh. They all look at each other for a second—a mad sort of 'are we doing this' look, cheeks flushed, eyebrows raised second—before bursting into laughter all at once. It's shaving Newt's head all over again, but sillier, more self-destructive, more relieving. And if they can feel like this, how bad can the situation really be?


	6. Chapter 6

The room is smoky, the fire alarm dangling from the ceiling by a green and yellow wire, batteries slid out of place and glinting in the light from Newt's laptop on the desk. Thomas's phone buzzes, an alarm in Morse code, to remind him he has things he's supposed to deal with. The idea of responsibility is oddly hilarious at the moment and he snickers, sliding the phone away, snorting when it thunks into the wall.

Newt rolls over onto his stomach, propping himself on his elbows and looking down at Thomas. Looming.

"Who is it this time? Teresa or Brenda?"

"I honestly don't give a shuck," Thomas shakes his head, reaching up to rub Newt's fuzzy head, barely plushy after the shaving incident a few weeks before.

"That's not a bloody good sign, is it?" Newt rolls the end of his joint between two fingers, touching it to the tip of Thomas's nose. "I had ten quid on you finally deciding by tomorrow. If you miss that deadline, buggin' Minho wins and I don't want to deal with his gloating. Do you?"

"You have a pool going?"

"It's boring without my own sex life to worry about."

"Minho is right, you know," Thomas plucks the joint from his friend's hand, fumbling with his lighter for a hilarious moment before striking the end of the paper and taking a deep breath. "You could get mad lucky with the whole cancer angle."

"Oh yes, everyone's favorite. The old 'I'm dying, fuck me before it's too late'." Newt shakes his head, "I'm not in the business of collecting pity shags."

"Too bad," Thomas holds the joint up to Newt's lips and he inhales, holding the smoke for a second before exhaling it through his nose. It stings Thomas's eyes and he laughs. "Are you hungry yet? Isn't this supposed to make you hungry?"

"I'm not ready to face the kitchen just yet," Newt rests his chin on Thomas's forehead for a second before sighing, biting his lip and blinking too slowly. "Frypan keeps trying to feed me. It freaks me out. I don't buggin' like it."

"He keeps trying to give me things to bring to you."

"Good that," Newt frowns, his head sagging, his forehead pressing against Thomas's. "Can we…change the subject? If I recall, this was originally me teasing you about your confusing taste in women."

"It's not confusing." Thomas closes his eyes, chewing on the inside of his cheek, like the pain will make it easier to think. Somehow it's so hard. It's probably the smoke, just the haze in his mind taking over. It has nothing to do with Newt. That's insane. "You're just jealous."

"That's funny, Tommy," Newt brushes his hair way from his forehead and the room feels warmer than it already did. Sweltering. Burning, like he's leaning over a fire. "And actually, I'm not jealous of your issues with women. I'm betting on them."

Thomas stares at his friend for a moment, and maybe it's the haze. Maybe it's the smoke, but he continues anyway, "what's the bet against me?"

"What does that bloody nonsense mean?"

"It means—what if I choose neither? How much money do you get then?"

"If you choose neither, I don't give a damn," Newt stamps out the joint on the ashtray, inhaling the smoky air and closing his eyes. "Why would I?"

"Money."

"I've never given a klunk about money, you know that," Newt leans down, too suddenly, too close, and presses his lips against Thomas's.

It's too warm. Too close. Thomas feels like he's going to explode at Newt's touch, the glancing contact of Newt's skin against his. This isn't what kissing feels like. This isn't mechanical and predictable and believable. This isn't the next step of something that was always, obviously moving forward. This is lightning. Lightning and fire and ice. This is impossible. Thomas kisses back with everything he understands, his hand dragging across Newt's fuzzy scalp, his fingers against the nape of Newt's neck.

"Shuck, I'm…I'm acting like a shucking crank," Newt pulls away, his accent thicker, like he's dragging all of the vowels through the moment's unusually heavy air.

Thomas wants to say no. Suddenly, powerfully. He wants to rebel, to tell Newt that he wanted it. He wanted every second of it. He wants more of it, in fact. He wants all the kisses he can worm his way into.

He can't say any of those things. For a million, complicated reasons, he's trapped, his mouth flapping uselessly. His heart pounding painfully against his chest.

"Shuck," he whispers, locked in by Newt's upside down, wide, chocolate eyes.

"Yeah," Newt sits up, his head blurring from view like a speeding racecar. It's funny, for some reason, and Thomas laughs, rolling to his front and sitting, leaning on his hand hard enough that it felt weak. Out of practice. "That about sums it up."

Thomas looks at his friend, tries to ignore the still tingling heat in his cheeks. Newt's expression is ambiguous, all sorts of fear and anger flitting across it in waves. Thomas looks for regret, a strange bubble of warmth swelling in his chest when he doesn't find it.

"I'm starving." He takes a deep breath of the smoky air. "And if you don't come down to eat with me, I'm pretty sure Frypan is going to force feed me twice as much so I come up here and feed you like a mother bird, so you should probably come with me."

"What? Next are you going to make me eat my shucking vegetables?" He sounds like Chuck and the imitation game has gone full circle.

"I just said I didn't want to be your mother bird. Let's go." Thomas stands up, offering his hand to his friend and ignoring the jolt when Newt takes it. He probably shouldn't smoke anymore. It makes everything feel funny and too intense. That kiss was…that kiss was probably what DARE warned him about. Don't do drugs or you'll make out with one of your best friends and like it.

And wouldn't that be unfortunate?

Thomas helps Newt to his feet, clapping him on the shoulder and dropping his hand. He doesn't feel lighter, but that's not saying much, given the starting point. Thomas misses just worrying about school and unbeatable video games and his brother sleeping over every other night. Worrying about Newt is worse than all of that. It's heavy, dragging across his every thought like molasses, polluting everything with a strange, foggy listlessness. If he thinks too hard about the monster in his best friend's brain, his whole life starts to look like this room. Foggy, paranoid, filled with feelings it shouldn't be.

Newt bends over suddenly, and Thomas jolts forward, one hand on his friend's stomach as he tries to pull him up straight. Newt shoves him off with a hand on his chest, brushing Thomas's touch off of his shirt and handing him his phone, which he'd completely forgotten about, unread texts and all.

"I wasn't keeling over," Newt frowns, a frown full of heat and anger that can't seem to push past the surface. "You should probably check that. Whoever it is texted again."

"Right," Thomas says slowly.

Newt runs a hand across his own fuzzy head, like he's trying to arrange hair that isn't there anymore, and his shoulders slump slightly. He glances at Thomas, cheeks flushed, radiating embarrassment like an aura.

"I wouldn't tell anyone—"

"You telling someone that we kissed is literally my smallest shucking problem. Let's go get something to eat." Newt laughs, a cartoonish guffaw that sounds entirely wrong, slamming the window open with entirely too much force. The smoke streams out as the cool night air flushes over them and Thomas blinks against it, his head clearing slightly.

He looks at his phone, it's a text from Brenda.

'SOS. Cops investigating break in.'

Thomas's heart drops to his stomach, to his knees, straight out of his feet and into the floor where it's frantic pounding shakes Thomas's whole frame, like an isolated earth quake. He looks up at Newt's back, disappearing down the hallway and around the corner. The loneliness is like a vice, pressing in on his temples, the problem he can't wrap his head around boxing him into a tiny little corner.

What he wouldn't give for it to be five minutes ago. Joking around about bets in a world where most things still seemed to make sense.

00000

"We'll just play it cool," Brenda's shrug is animated, like she's trying to show a satellite how completely, fanatically easy going she is. "They don't know it was us."

Thomas reads the e-mail from the school for what feels like the millionth time.

 _Dear Students,_

 _Three weeks ago, two perpetrators who we now believe to be students broke into the Life Science's building and vandalized the fire escape. If you have any information on this crime, please report it to Detective Janson at campus police, and reward for the information will be discussed. This is a stain on our students' excellent reputation and needs to be addressed promptly._

 _Dean Paige_

The words stab like individual threats into Thomas's chest. He's never even gotten a detention before, and now they're calling it vandalism.

"…Thomas," Brenda waves her hand in front of his face, "don't zone out on me, alright? It's going to be fine. There's nothing they can do. They wouldn't have sent this out if they had any idea it was us."

"Maybe we should just tell them," Thomas frowns, wondering if it's a test. If they know who did it, if the reward is some sort of reduced sentence for the crime.

His foster mother, one he had a few back, used to pull that trick all of the time. She'd line up all the kids she had at the time and try to get them to rat each other out. Whoever didn't talk would be punished, it didn't matter who did it. Chuck wouldn't ever talk, and when Thomas talked for him, she'd punish him anyway. Thomas took blame for a lot of things in those two years and it got them kicked out eventually when it involved a broken punch bowl that had belonged to the wretched woman's grandmother.

That foster parent was one of Thomas's least favorite, and one of the few he remembers so clearly he still gets angry when imagining their face. She fancied herself an economist, made the kids work in the context of supply and demand. The more they asked for something the less of it there was.

"Hey," Brenda says too sharply for her calm exterior, and Thomas feels closer to her than ever, looking at his own nerves reflected on her face. It's different than Teresa, Teresa would tell him what to do, Teresa would make this all seem obvious, but there's something about the confusion, the alarm in Brenda's face that makes him feel guilty for comparing the two. "They don't know. They can't."

"But what if they do?"

"If they do, it's all inevitable," she smirks, "so we might as well enjoy the time we have."

She has a way of making everything sound pressing, certain. Like she'll give him the answer. He accepts it for the moment, using it to smother the defiant nerves in his gut. She has to be right. They don't know. They couldn't. She loops her arm through his and steers them, "come on. I'm starving. Let's go get something to eat."

00000

Thomas knocks on Newt's door, chewing on the inside of his cheek and trying not to imagine the older boy being disappointed with him. Trying not to imagine his friend turning him in. That's all he can think about, Newt's lips curled with unfamiliar malice as he tells someone that Thomas wasn't home that night, that Newt covered for him. That he regrets it.

But not telling anyone is driving insane. His mind would win every single turning molehills into mountains competition that could ever be staged. He spent an hour before falling asleep last night just…staring at the e-mail, the promise of the reward, listening to Chuck's breathing and trying not to focus on the fact that he threw all of this away.

Newt opens the door, his face falling slightly when he sees Thomas. Great, exactly the reaction he was looking for.

"Yeah?" Newt leans on the doorframe, hand still locked on the edge of his door.

"I…I need advice on something," Thomas swallows, "and I need to tell you something. And can I come in?"

"Sure," Newt drags out the word slightly, staring at Thomas with that peculiar half frown and stepping back slowly from the doorframe. He cocks his head when Thomas steps inside, shutting the door behind him.

"Can I sit down?"

Newt gestures to his desk chair, sitting himself in the middle of his bed, cross-legged. The room is vaguely smoky and cold due to the open window. Half of a joint sits unfinished in the ashtray, a half eaten sandwich on a plate next to it. The whole room is vaguely in disarray, shoes on the floor, a pile of dirty clothes near the foot of the bed, like someone unceremoniously kicked them off.

"This is all very cryptic," Newt rubs his temple, the motion stiff and mechanical, like he does it very often and his heart isn't in it at all.

"Yeah," Thomas runs his hand through his hair, "it's…shuck."

"That's optimistic," Newt frowns at his lap. His hair is growing back with a vengeance, like it was personally offended by being cut so short, the ends that were so bristled two weeks ago now curling every which way.

Thomas fiddles with his phone, exhaling pointedly and clearing his throat, "did you get the email? About the vandalism."

"No," Newt is taken aback, blinking twice and shaking his head, "must have gotten lost somewhere in the bloody stack this morning—"

"They're talking about Brenda and my…date." Thomas blurts, the relief like a sucker punch to the gut, "She has a key to the building and I failed that quiz and she wanted me to go in and change it, but I didn't change it, and we had to bail out of the window because the cops showed up and I guess the fire escape got damaged and now they're looking for us and you covered for me before, but I don't see how it'll hold and—and I have no idea what to do."

Newt blinks, "good that."

"What?"

"That…right." Newt rubs his hands together, "wow." He grins, "Your cat burglar skills are klunk. That's why you study so shucking much, isn't it? You realized you'd have no chance making it as a bloody art thief."

"I'm not laughing," Thomas feels utterly defeated. It can only be a matter of time before someone puts together that he was there and then what?

"Tommy, we can figure this out."

The 'we' is reassuring, almost as reassuring as Newt's nickname for him. He still has at least one friend who will stand by him, one person who knows the truth but isn't staring at him like he's someone different now.

"They wouldn't have sent that e-mail if they had any idea who it was," Newt starts, numbering on his finger, "so they obviously have no idea you were involved. Do you know the exact damage caused to the building?"

"No, I didn't even know it was shucking broken. I bet it was that shank cop, making sure he had reason to catch us."

"So you didn't change your test and you have no buggin' idea what damage was done?"

"Yeah," Thomas's ears feel hot. The ball of snarled tension in his gut is unwinding slowly, his head suddenly aching from holding it so tightly together for so long. "But what if they figure it out?"

"Have you told anyone?" Newt shakes his head, "of course you haven't. You've been sneaking around for a bloody week looking like you were going to hit something. It's all a big shuck secret, isn't it?"

Thomas doesn't think to point out that now Newt knows. Of course Newt wouldn't tell. The idea of Newt going behind his back is so preposterous he can barely imagine it.

"And for the record, Tommy, it's _vandalism_ , you didn't kill some shank in cold blood." He shakes his head and Thomas can't help but notice that Newt looks as bizarrely relieved as he feels. "If they can even tie you to it, which would be buggin' hard, given what they know. Brenda, sure, she has a key, but still, that makes the whole bloody idea of breaking and entering debatable."

"I'll lose my scholarship if they catch me."

Newt thinks on that for a second, chin in his hand, staring at the floor a foot in front of Thomas's shoes. He's putting the weight back on, that instant five pound loss that happened in the wake of his first treatment melting away, the sharp angles of his shoulders softening slightly. He looks back up at Thomas's face, narrowing his eyes slightly and smiling a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.

"You know, with you stomping around in a shucking huff all week avoiding me, I thought you were carrying on about—" He seems to rethink it for a moment, holding his next word carefully, "about that kiss."

"Kiss?" Thomas barks a laugh, "no, not at all. That was just…a situation, and I got the text from Brenda about them filing a police report on the building and I guess I just…forgot."

"I bloody envy that about you, you know?" Newt picks up his joint and examines it like it's going to speak up and give him some answer. "You never sit around worrying about some shucking kiss when you've got more important klunk going on."

"There wasn't anything to worry about." Thomas remembers the kiss, now, in all of its strangeness. The hazy room, the gauzy feeling of his own limbs, the detachment from everything and everyone besides the boy across from him. It's like someone else's memory, honestly, a patchwork quilt of impossible passed down from someone else and reimagined crudely in his own brain.

"Good that," Newt lights his joint, taking a deep breath and releasing some of the smoke through his nostrils. "I thought I was going to have to kill you for turning me down."

"If they catch me, I might have to take you up on that," Thomas laughs, standing and crossing the room to sit next to Newt on his bed. He holds his hand out for the joint, because a week's worth of twisted, awful stress doesn't dissolve on its own.

"Tommy, if you want me to kill you, you're going to have to do a whole lot more than bloody kiss me."

00000

"What's wrong?" Teresa leans in close, textbooks forgotten, her hand on his knee. Her fingers are too warm, making him dizzy in the best way possible. He feels in that moment that he'd tell her anything and that her reaction couldn't be anything but the truth.

"Nothing," He shrugs, "I'm just tired."

"Have you been staying up with Newt?" She squeezes his knee.

"He doesn't sleep so well," Thomas shrugs, like it's not a big deal, but in the moment he's proud of something that only felt natural the night before. "I don't mind keeping him company."

"You're a good friend," she leans back down over her book, and he follows the sweeping line of her shoulders, her upper back. She tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles at him, "What?"

"Nothing," he leans forward and starts reading again.

He wants to tell her that she's pretty, but she already knows that, and there's a sort of beauty in the silence.

They read a few more minutes in silence, her fingers drumming out a slow beat on his knee, when the doubts start creeping back in. The chief of campus police came to the house last night to talk about the charges and it reeked of them getting closer. He can't get over the penetrating way Janson looked at him, like he could see right through the barricade of half-truths surrounding his alibi.

"What's up, Tom?" Teresa asks again, jostling her shoulder against his, "I always know when something is wrong, you can't hide it. Intuition," she presses her finger to his temple and it makes him smile.

"Eh," he grabs her hand just to hold it, his fingers curled around her palm. "I don't want to bother you with it."

"It's not bothering me, stupid," she kisses his cheek. "You can tell me anything."

He almost asks her then, what they are. He wants so badly to call her his girlfriend, and that's what he thinks she acts like, but he sees her too sporadically, is greeted too differently each time to be sure. He wonders what would happen if he kissed her.

"You know….you know that whole breaking and entering thing the school is investigating?" It's easier to tell her than it was to tell Newt because some part of him is sure she already knows. How could she not with the way she reads his mind?

"I hope they catch whoever did it," she glowers at the table.

"I mean, hardly anything got broken—"

"That doesn't matter. They broke in, they deserve to be punished, like anyone breaking the rules."

"What if I said it was me?" He winces as the words come out, wishing he'd held them back but knowing all the same it would have been futile. He needs to hear her judgement, to hear what he should believe. He needs the guidance. Not like Newt's 'lead a horse to water' technique, he wants someone to drown him in understanding, to make the last of his anxious worries go away.

"Hypothetically, I hope," she laughs, raising an eyebrow.

He launches into the whole story unthinking, telling her twice that he didn't change his test, that they didn't change anything in the office, that the jumped in and out in a moment and that was it. She stares at him disbelieving. Disappointed.

"Brenda used her key to open the building and help you cheat?"

"But we didn't change the tests," he reiterates. That part feels important to him, or maybe it's the only part still clinging to morality.

"It's hard to draw a line in the right place sometimes," she thinks so hard about it that it trips Thomas up, and he finds himself wondering what she means.

Does she mean she could have drawn a better line? Probably. And she probably could have. She's the one person that makes him feel so small, like he can't comprehend what he can't comprehend.

"It's not a line so much as a…maze," he laughs but instantly wishes he hadn't when she stares at him, through him, like he's disappearing in front of her.

"There's always a line somewhere."

He looks at his hands, feeling guilty for the first time since his and Brenda's mad sprint. Since then he's been angry and scared and anxious, but he hasn't been guilty. He hasn't felt that the eventual punishment fits the crime until now.

"How can you be so sure about things?"

"Someone has to be," she whispers before leaning in and kissing him, hand in his hair, tilting his head towards her. And it silences the questioning voice at the back of his head, the worry about telling her. She fills his senses with something better, restorative, filling in all of the cracks. A full patch job for body and mind.

00000

"Shuck," Thomas swears under his breath when Peach lands on a minigame spot with a delighted little twirl. He hates the minigames, he's awful at them, and they're close this time, in first, second and third in the last five turns.

"You've got it, Tommy," Newt sets down his controller, his hands landing bracingly on Thomas's shoulders. "It's just limbo. You can do this, just find your rhythm."

Thomas presses start and Newt drums a fingertip against his shoulder, trying to help.

"Come on, Greenie. We don't have all day," Minho is too focused, hunched forward, his elbows on his knees. It's just past midnight and the day hits Thomas all at once, the game in front of him suddenly impossible.

"Don't listen to him," Newt shakes Thomas's shoulders, "you can do it." He works his thumbs into the stress tight muscle behind Thomas's neck and his thumb stutters on the button. Princess Peach wails and almost falls. "Focus, Tommy, focus."

"Are we playing or not?"

Thomas redoubles his focus, hopping a bit unevenly forward. The music speeds up and so does Newt's finger, a metronome on his shoulder. He jostles the last limbo pole but scrapes through, hopping through the finish. Peach hoots, spinning in a circle.

"Nice," Newt drums his fist against Thomas's shoulders one last time before picking his controller back up and taking his turn. Minho gives Thomas a high five, his expression absent and focused all at once.

It's a two player game, Newt paired with the computer, and Minho taps his hand on the arm of the couch for a moment, "yo, Thomas, we have to win this."

"Go for it," Newt sets his controller down again, "I won't help." The two boys fist bump and Thomas shakes his head, trying to focus on the screen. "Let Minho steer," Newt cautions again, his hands back on Thomas's shoulders. "You have better luck if one person steers and the other focuses on speed."

"You never coach me like that," Minho smirks knowingly at the two of them, "ready, Greenie?"

"That's still not motivating," Thomas reaches around Newt to punch Minho in the ribs.

"Fine Princess," Minho shakes his head, "is that better?"

"Your Majesty works too," Thomas leans forward slightly, trying to focus on the TV in front of them. Newt's knuckles dig into a tight spot in his mid-back and he groans, leaning back into the touch in spite of himself.

Minho presses start and they're off sledding, racing around the competitor driven only by the computer. Luigi loses by a landslide, Yoshi steering him off of the path entirely around one of the sharper corners. Newt takes his hands away from Thomas's back, picking his controller up again and leaning forward, their sides pressed together more tightly than before. Thomas doesn't know why he's so aware of it, probably their elbows bumping together as they play, and he scoots slightly towards the arm of the couch, trying to make room.

Newt tucks one leg underneath his seat, his knee halfway on Thomas's lap.

The next few turns are relatively uneventful until Luigi lands on a minigame spot. Minho groans, "the computer is great at this one, shuck."

Luigi wins thirty coins, steals a star, and shoves Princess Peach off of the podium. Newt groans, Minho throws his controller across the room, pressing his hands to his eyes and swearing under his breath.

"We'll get you next time, Tommy," Newt shakes his head, grabbing Thomas's shoulders and shaking him slightly. His hands squeeze slightly once, twice, and Thomas stretches into it in spite of himself.

"We aren't playing with that slinthead Luigi anymore," Minho rubs his eyes one last time, "Lucky shank."

"We were close that time though," Thomas nods.

"Yeah, we've been close a million shucking times."

"That was good though, for your first real game," Newt's hands drag down a few inches, pressing into another sore muscle from that weekend's race.

"Peach suits you," Minho laughs, his eyes darting between whatever Newt's hands are doing and Thomas's face, his smile drooping slightly. "Come on, dude, we should get to bed. Morning practice tomorrow."

"I'm trying to give Chuck a few more solid hours," Thomas shrugs. Newt keeps rubbing and rubbing and Thomas's head lolls forward, chin against his chest.

"But he _lost_ ," Minho laughs a little too loudly at his own bad joke, standing and stretching with a wide yawn. "Why does he get the back rub? Why do you have to tease me like this, Newt?"

"He's the one that needs cheering up."

"I'll see you shanks in the morning," Minho says a little too slowly, a little too purposefully, pulling his phone out of his pocket on the way out of the room.

"Night, dear," Newt teases. Thomas's phone buzzes in his pocket and he shifts, setting his controller down. Newt finds a particularly tense part, rubbing in a small circle, and Thomas shivers.

"You really don't have to do that."

"Eh," Newt turns slightly, getting a better angle, "you said you were giving Chuck more sleep? That can't be fun, sharing a bed with your thirteen-year-old brother."

"We've had worse," Thomas shrugs, "there was a foster home a few years ago where one of the beds that was supposed to be ours actually belonged to the family's massive, evil dog. That thing would growl every time one of us rolled over. Chuck slept in a ball on the pillow for six months."

"I'm sorry, Tommy." He's quiet for a moment, his hands slowing down, the pressure easing. A strange sort of embarrassed heat blooms in Thomas's stomach and he shifts slightly in his seat, wondering why he let Newt do that, why it's conflicting. Why he's nervous about what Minho texted him. "You know, I'm not sleeping so well, new medication makes it feel like I'm covered in shucking ants if I sit still for a bleeding second, but if you wanted, you could sleep in my bed."

The offer exacerbates the strangeness and Thomas stiffens slightly, scratching the top of his head.

"Nah, you need your rest."

"I'm literally going to go upstairs and read in my bloody desk chair."

Thomas thinks about it for a second, earnestly, imagines what color Newt's sheets are, whether they're soft or pressed and crisp. He thinks about it a bit too hard, scooting away from Newt's touch and turning to face him with half of a shrug.

"Chuck would worry."

"Right, Chuck."

"Yeah, Chuck," Thomas feels a bit shaky as he stands, and he wipes mysteriously sweaty palms on his jeans as he takes a step towards the doorway. "I'll—I'll talk to you tomorrow, alright? At least try and get some sleep."

"You're cute when you're worried," Newt smiles a conflicted smile, like he can't quite figure something out. "G'night, Tommy."

"Yeah. Goodnight." Thomas pulls his phone out of his pocket on the way towards the stairs, a single text from Minho visible: **Careful**.

00000


	7. Chapter 7

Thomas jumps at Newt's voice cutting through the steamy bathroom, "hey Tommy, I mind if I come in for a second?"

"Uhh, sure?" Thomas adjusts the shower curtain, feeling suddenly, strangely self-conscious. He's an athlete, he's showered in public showers more times than private, probably, at least over the last four years, but the back of his neck prickles when Newt shuts the door behind him.

"Sorry, just need the sink for a moment." Newt brushes his teeth like he's taking something out on the toothbrush, spitting the toothpaste into the sink and washing it down. The shower temperature dips for a moment and Thomas crosses his arms, moving more fully under the stream. "I knocked, you know," he laughs, the sound high pitched and off kilter, "you just didn't answer."

"Yeah, I was washing my hair."

"Fuck," he mutters, "I forgot about my hair."

"What's wrong with your hair?" Thomas peeks out around the curtain in spite of himself, and Newt is bent forward over the counter, staring intently at his expression. He spots Thomas in the mirror and his lips twitch into a weak imitation of a smile.

"Skyping my parents in fifteen shucking minutes," he explains with a shrug, "bloody forgot about it until my warning alarm went off."

"Oh," Thomas wipes a dribble of water from his forehead, holding the curtain a little closer to his chest, leaning against the wall. "Why is skyping your parents such a big deal?"

"They haven't seen me since…" he glances at the toilet, "since I restarted chemo."

"Ah," Thomas shifts, his foot squeaking against the wet floor, reminding him all at once that he's in the shower, that this should be a strange conversation. "You're looking better, though."

"They don't know I shaved my buggin' head," Newt scratches the top of his head, too roughly, like he can grow his hair back all at once.

"Why would they care?"

His face darkens and he stares at the mirror again, like he's looking at a ghost. "Sort of rash, innit? Not my sanest thought, it didn't take me forty-eight bloody hours before I was pissed drunk and shaving my head."

"Technically, I shaved your head. Blame me."

Newt smiles at that, "thanks, Tommy."

"I don't see why they'd care though, really. It looks fine." It feels strange saying it, looking at Newt's appearance as a holistic sort of _thing_ , like it matters, like it's something Thomas thinks about. The strangest part is that it isn't that strange, that he knows Newt looks better than he did a week ago, that his color is better, his cheeks less hollow. Thomas repositions the shower curtain across his chest, pinning it to the wall with his hip.

"You wouldn't call me…impulsive, would you?"

He thinks of the Newt he met when he first moved in, the Newt that warned him, the Newt that told him what was what. He thinks of Newt slamming around the kitchen because he smelled smoke that wasn't there, of Newt drunk and open and raw. He wonders which is real, how he could possibly draw a line between them. If there is a line it's blurry, zigging and zagging based on the day or the meds or something Thomas hasn't caught onto yet.

"Right," Newt sighs.

"No, you just—it's just when you get worked up about being sick, you get—"

" _Cranky,_ " he fills in, shifting between his feet. He looks down at his bad ankle and Thomas almost asks about it. "Yeah, bloody figures."

"You aren't—"

"Coming in here while you're in the buggin' shower, what the _hell_ was I thinking," he pushes away from the counter, his limp worse than normal as he steps towards the door. For a mad moment, Thomas thinks about stopping him, about stepping out of the tub and grabbing his arm. He doesn't know what he'd say, but he wants to say something, wants to fix this problem.

Newt slams the door on his way out and Thomas stays in the shower a few minutes longer than he normally would. The water starts to go cold, the steam dripping down the mirror in hectic little rivulets as he finally turns the shower off and steps out to dry off. He wonders if it's the tumor, that makes Newt act strangely, or if it's just the looming threat of it. The clouds drifting over the mountains making him yearn for one last day in the sun.

He thinks about the way Newt says crank, about the venom behind it. He thinks about commercials for Make a Wish, cameras zooming in on sick kids at NFL games, the way they're always so wide eyed and hopeful. Maybe crank is something that comes after that, around that. When hoping gets to be too hard, when tomorrow is too uncertain and now seems like a way more boundless place.

And when it comes to Newt, Newt who thrives in the bounds of order, Newt who seems to like rules and the regimented problems that occur within them, that must be awful. Newt, who wanted to climb the ladder, to go step by step, suddenly realizing he won't have time that he'll have to stray from the road.

Thomas gets dressed feeling somber, strange, like he wants to finish their conversation but isn't really sure what they were talking about. He tosses his towel into his room before walking down the hall towards Newt's, pausing outside the open door when he hears voices.

"And you're taking all your meds? You're remembering every day?"

"Yes Mum," Newt sighs indulgently, and it occurs to Thomas that he isn't any better at taking orders than the rest of them. It makes Thomas smile and he creeps forward, leaning around the doorway. Newt is sitting at his desk, cradling his head in his hand, facing a computer screen with two people who look very much like him on it. His mother is worried, brow furrowed in a way Thomas has seen a million times on Newt's own face and his father is brushing crumbs out of a blonde moustache, the exact, particular color of Newt's own hair.

"And you're sleeping? And you're going to classes too, dear? You don't have to, you know, I'm sure your professors will understand, they wouldn't want you overtaxing yourself either. You don't need the stress—"

"It's handled, Mum."

"Don't be short with your mother, Isaac," his father chides affectionately, and Thomas can see it all in his mind's eye, Newt's parents sending him for a time out when he did something wrong, talking it through with him. Conflicting jealousy and admiration whirl all at once in Thomas's chest and he feels guilty for eaves-dropping. "It's all I can do to keep her from getting on a plane tomorrow."

"There's nothing you could do, anyway."

"The medication _will_ work," there's an edge to his mother's voice. "What is it this time? Zoloft again? That made you awfully peaky last time, you need to keep your strength up—"

"Look at me," Newt holds his arms out from his sides, "I'm obviously keeping my bloody strength up."

"He gets this from you, dear," his mother shakes her head, a weak, sort of watery smile on her face.

"He's taking care of himself."

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," Newt laughs but there's an edge to it, that familiar edge that always seems to accompany people discussing his head or his treatment or anything he doesn't want to talk about. "Minho is helping too, he's keeping an eye on me, Mum. And—and well, I've got people. I'm taking my meds. You should be worried about Gran anyway."

"I'm worried about both of you equally," she pronounces and Thomas can hear Newt's breathing in the silence that stretches.

"We really must be going," Newt's dad wraps his arm over his mom's shoulders in a bracing hug and Newt's back stiffens noticeably, his shirt stretched briefly across the breadth of his shoulders. "Told the home we'd be there in an hour."

"Say hi to Gran for me," Newt's finger hovers over his track pad while his parents say goodbye and he hangs up with a last 'I love you too' and a sigh. "How much did you hear?" He spins around and looks at Thomas, arms crossed.

"Not much."

"Dad thought the haircut was practical," Newt shakes his head, "sorry about that earlier, by the way, I just...I always build it up in my head to be buggin' worse than it ever shucking is."

Thomas lingers at the door for another second before stepping inside and sitting on the foot of Newt's bed. "They love you, I saw that much."

Newt looks at him, a lingering, steady sort of look, before moving to sit next to him, their knees barely touching. He stares at his hands, wringing them together on his lap, "I didn't handle this klunk very well before. The meds…it's like I'm not really myself. Sometimes. I know I'm being cranky, but I can't fix it. It's like I'm shucking yelling in a room full of people, but no one…they notice, but no one cares."

Thomas thinks of how scared he is with this investigation sniffing around his feet. He thinks about Brenda's laugh, Teresa's disappointment, the fact that neither of them took a moment to wonder if he was ok. Not the situation, just… _Thomas_ , as a person. Whether he was crumbling.

"I care," he bumps Newt's shoulder with his. And all at once, it's too close, and Thomas takes half a step back, "Isaac huh? I guess I should have known your parents didn't name you Newt, but…you don't look like an Isaac."

"Newt, like Isaac Newton," he mutters under his breath, "I was a smart kid, apparently, Isaac only ever came out when I was in trouble."

"I thought you said it went well."

"My parents haven't called me Newt in years," he stares at his feet and he looks like he's on the cusp of admitting something. Thomas opens his mouth to ask what it is and Newt looks at him, usually open eyes locked off like steel vaults.

"I like Newt."

They stare at each other again, and it feels like something, it feels fraught and strange and Thomas can't put his finger on why. He wants to leave. He wants to stay. He wants to shut an imaginary door between them and the rest of the world.

"Well," Newt sits up straight, rubs his hands together like he's dusting something off of them, "at least I've got that going for me. I'm going to have a smoke, feeling a bit off, in or out?"

Thomas thinks of the stack of homework he doesn't want to do and shrugs, "I'll hang out."

00000

Thomas can't believe what he's seeing. He didn't know what to think when the cop came to his classroom, he didn't know what they'd found. Sure, he's been nervous, he's been waiting for this particular hammer to fall, but he didn't expect it to happen in his 10 am English class. The cop leads him down the hallway, watching him with a wary eye, to the office he really doesn't want to think about, the office he's avoided like the plague since that stupid night.

Inside he sees Brenda, instantly recognizable by her small stature and defiant posture, sitting across from the chief of campus police, Officer Janson, the same rat faced cad that tried to punish Chuck for existing.

"Shuck," he mutters under his breath, his legs suddenly feeling like lead as he stumbles through the door.

Teresa is standing in the corner, looking sheepish but determined, her blue eyes locked immediately and unapologetically on his.

She couldn't have. How _could_ she?

When he'd told her about it felt like stretching a bridge between them, enforcing the strange sense of home he felt when he first saw her. He thinks of his _home_ , the home Chuck isn't ever at, and wonders for a second if _home_ is even an idea he understands.

"Miss Agnes has informed me that you two were behind the break in and subsequent fire escape vandalism outside of this window," Janson looks like every victorious cop Thomas has ever seen, like he just brought down an international drug ring rather than caught a couple of kids who broke a ladder.

"How would she know anything?" Brenda snaps, her face red and splotchy, her eyes wide. She's scared and that makes Thomas more nervous than anything else.

Teresa glances at Thomas and crosses her arms.

"You have a key to this building, don't you?" The cop points at Brenda, who crosses her arms and shakes her head.

"What does that have to do with anything? Plenty of people have keys to the building—"

"And none of them were seen hurtling off of the fire escape. That was you."

There's a moment then, a scalding, terrifying moment where Brenda looks at Thomas, expecting him to have some solution that he doesn't, that he can't. And for the first time, this isn't some crazy plan he got roped into, this is something he _participated in_. This is a problem he encountered he didn't bother thinking of a solution for and now Brenda wants that from him.

She looks at him like she wants a savior, not a sidekick, and Thomas doesn't really remember signing up to be either.

"Tell them exactly what you saw, Miss Agnes," the cop points at Teresa in the corner and she clears her throat, looking bigger than normal, almost looming as she exhales in a measured, prepared way.

"I was walking back to my dorm from the computer lab." Lie Number 1. "When I heard yelling and saw Thomas running across the parking lot. We're friends," she says it like it's so easy, like if she says it enough it'll make it true, "so I went over to the fence to see why he was running and I saw Brenda. And then the cop was running after them, and the ladder was breaking—"

"You couldn't have seen the ladder break from the other side of the fence," Brenda turns to Teresa and _spits_ , breathing too hard, unfamiliar with a problem she can't dodge her way out of.

"That's a student restricted parking lot, how do you know what it looks like, young lady?" Janson narrows his eyes at Brenda before glancing at Thomas.

Brenda reaches over and grabs Thomas's hand, squeezing hard enough that it hurts, and Janson's eyes light up like he put the puzzle together. Thomas looks at Brenda out of the corner of his eye, her terrified expression, the way she keeps looking at him for help.

He can help her.

He can dig her out of this hole, his quiz grade is enough, they'll believe he wanted to break in.

"It was my idea," he blurts. "You can look at my grade in this class, on that day, I failed a quiz. I thought I could break in and fix it and leave without anyone knowing the wiser. I asked for her key but she wouldn't give it to me. She came with me instead."

"No, that's not what—" Teresa starts, cutting off abruptly. Probably when she realizes she has no way to back up her story, no way to look sparkling clean if she tries to steer this meeting anymore.

"Is that what happened?" The officer asks Brenda, and she looks at Thomas for a second before nodding slowly.

"That's about it."

A wave of ice crashes through Thomas's veins and he exhales sharply, yanking his hand away from Brenda's. He's an idiot, he knew it was stupid when he said it, knew what he was signing himself up for, but until this second, he trusted Brenda. He saved her record when he said what he said, and he doesn't regret that, fundamentally, but he didn't realize that if she went along with it, it would shatter the embryonic trust that they had.

Brenda is the kind of person who will drag him into a dangerous situation then look to him to drag her out, and he suddenly sees it so clearly it hurts.

"I didn't change my test though. We got caught first. So it's not against Academic Honor Code," Thomas sounds stupid saying it, fighting for something so small in the face of something so shucking stupid. "It's just the vandalism."

Somehow, his relationship with his grades feels like the only one in the room worth saving and he presses forward, feeling silly but determined. "I'll pay it back. I'll get the money somehow and—"

"You'll have a hearing at the city hall next week," the officer cuts him off, scrawling on the carbon copy ticket paper in front of him. "The court date is twenty fifth, at nine o'clock. You'll get your sentence there."

"Fine," Thomas takes his copy of the ticket and stuffs it into his pocket. "Can I go now?"

He doesn't wait for an answer, springing to his feet and stalking out of the room before Teresa can look at him, before Brenda can reach for his hand again. He wants his living room. He wants his friends. He wants someone to tell him that this isn't the end of his college career, that somehow, it's not all going to be taken away for a stupid vandalism charge.

Brenda catches up to him right down the hall, the congratulatory, supportive sounds of Janson telling Teresa that she did the right thing echoing in the background. Brenda tries to loop her arm through Thomas's and he steps away, running his hand along the back of his neck to avoid the touch.

"Thanks for that back there, that was a close one."

"It was a little more than a close one, thanks," he pats the ticket in his pocket, stalking down the hallway and hoping she won't follow.

"You really helped me out back there, let me say thank you—"

"Maybe I'll let you make it up to me if I don't lose my scholarship," he snaps. "We shouldn't talk about this here. Or ever."

It's mean enough that she lets him leave, mean enough that she doesn't follow as he takes the stairs two at a time, bursting outside. The world is cold, calm, so real that Thomas can't pretend that didn't just happen, that a decade carefully pacing the straight and narrow no matter how hard it got could end in a stupid vandalism charge for something he didn't even break.

"Tom wait," it's Teresa and he walks away as fast as he can, sighing when her footfalls speed up and she catches him with a hand on his upper arm. "Thomas—"

"What was that all about?"

"They were going to take it out of the research budget," her fingers curl in his jacket and drag him to a stop. He whirls to face her.

"You threw us under the bus for a research budget?"

"No, Tom, you threw yourself under the bus when you lied about what happened."

"I wouldn't have had to lie about it if you didn't turn us in—"

"I don't like when you do stupid, dangerous things," she grabs both of his arms at once, running her hands up and down them. "It's because I care about you. I told you to trust me, if you'd just stayed quiet they would have figured it out, she had the key—"

"I trusted you." He looks over her shoulder and sees Brenda, pale and slack-jawed, like there's something to be upset about here besides the slip of paper in his pocket. "I trusted both of you."

"Tom," Teresa whispers one more time, her fingers hooked in the sleeves of his jacket, and he can't bring himself to feel bad about it when he shakes her off and stalks towards home.

0000

"Those complete _slintheads_ ," Minho paces, and while Thomas hasn't heard that particular piece of Glader slang before, the force behind it resonates.

Newt is holding the summons, his knuckles white, his face pinched. He sets it down on the kitchen counter and pops a pill from the bottle constantly in his pocket.

"Just letting you take all of the blame—"

"We get it, Minho," even Newt's quietest voice is effective now and Minho goes quiet, pacing the room with his hands behind his back. "It's still a hearing, Tommy, you still have a chance to make your case."

"What? Are you going to tell me this isn't the end of the world?"

"That is a bit overdramatic," Newt tries to smile, but it never reaches his eyes. Thomas wonders if he's still being weird about their kiss. Thomas nearly forgot about it as soon as he heard they were investigating the vandalism charge that has now been so gracefully draped over his shoulders, but he remembers it all now, looking at Newt's carefully measured expression.

"These things happen to me."

Newt smiles at that, a real smile, "I know a little bit about klunk luck, Tommy." He shakes his head, scratching the back of his neck, "I'll give you a ride, yeah? It can't be that awful, it's just a shuck vandalism charge—"

"What did the greenie do now?" Gally is leaning in the doorway, apparently eavesdropping. "Greenie is in actual trouble?" He walks in and picks up the ticket, scanning it with a far too gleeful look in his eyes. "He's out. He has to be out."

"What?"

"It's one of the glade rules. Clean criminal records, it's one of the very basic—"

"This ticket is a piece of klunk," Minho steps in, taking the ticket away and handing it to Thomas. "It shouldn't count—"

"Newt! He broke the rules, the first most important rule of the Glade, he has to be kicked out, he can't just get the shuck away with this—"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Minho nearly growls, and for the first time since Newt's diagnosis, he feels like he's on his teammates good side. "It was—"

"Don't tell me it was that _girl_ ," Gally flexes, "I swear—"

"Just because you can't get a date—" Minho steps forward, fists clenched.

"Slim it. Everyone." Newt shakes his head, and Thomas wonders for a second if he acts so feeble because he sees it brings them together. Gally deflates immediately, shrinking down like an apologetic dog and offering a hand to Newt, like he needs to be held up. Minho steps back, like all that karate is finally paying off towards his impulse control. Thomas feels like absolute klunk, bringing his problems back to Newt. "I'll talk to Alby. I'll take him to his hearing, and we'll decide there. Until then, an extra night of dishes duty, alright Tommy?"

"This is bullshit," Gally grumbles, storming out of the room.

Newt perks up immediately, leaning back against the counter with his usual lazy grace. "We'll get it figured out. We aren't going to leave you to bloody rot."

"Thanks, guys."

"No problem," Minho pats Thomas on the back, "I've always wanted an excuse to punch that guy."

"Haven't we all," Newt stands and stuffs his hands in his pockets, "everyone is leaving for thanksgiving soon anyway, it should be relatively quiet until the trial." He elbows Thomas, "we'll get it figured out."

Minho looks between them, shaking his head with apparent astonishment and checking his pocket for his phone, "I have to go to karate. I'll see you shanks later."

"Don't start any fights you can't win," Thomas calls after him, gratified at his responding snort.

"Not possible, Greenie."

The door shuts behind him and it's too quiet in the kitchen. Thomas thinks about the kiss and he flinches for a moment. He thinks about how Teresa always seemed to read his mind and glances at Newt, at his easy posture. He's looking better, after his last treatment. Like he's gained the weight he lost, his color back to normal.

"You act sick when Gally is around, don't you?"

"Always with the questions, Tommy," but Newt's smile is answer enough. "I don't have Alby's raw dominance, and he's so busy this whole place would have gone to klunk if someone hadn't stepped in."

"How are you _actually_ feeling?"

"That's your question?" His expression warms as he scratches the top of his head. Thomas shrugs and Newt matches the motion. "Like there's some great, bloody hammer over my head waiting to decide my whole shuck future. Not that you would know anything about that."


	8. Chapter 8

"So this shucking trial," Minho stops at the end of their run, checking his watch and folding his hands on top of his head.

"So what about it?"

"So it's the shucking dumbest klunk I've ever heard."

Thomas weighs that in his mind for a moment, his knees a little weak from thinking about it this soon after a run, "pretty much."

"Do you think you're going to get out of it?"

"I pretty much admitted to it," Thomas shrugs. They walk side by side into the locker room and Minho slings his towel over his shoulder, pausing for a moment leaning against the locker.

"Why'd you do that?"

"I didn't want anything bad to happen to anyone else." Thomas thinks back to that room, with Janson grinning over at him, that rat face so gleefully, maliciously squinched. "And I could tell that Brenda wasn't going to say anything, and Teresa had already thrown me under the shuck bus and—I guess it was sort of a test. If she called me out on my lie, she'd earn my trust. But she didn't. And…and here I am."

"Remind me never to gamble with you, you dumb shank."

"I'm a high stakes sort of guy, I guess."

"Yeah, I think I knew that," Minho looks at him evenly, "look, you and Newt are going to be alone over Thanksgiving—"

"And Chuck."

"Yeah, whatever, you three shanks all alone in a big house. Don't use it as an opportunity to practice your klunk gambling skills, alright? Newt doesn't shucking need that."

Thomas flushes. He wants to say he has no idea what Minho is talking about, and at the core, he doesn't, he just knows he feels warm and guilty whenever Newt looks at him. Like he wishes he could donate some of his guaranteed years to someone who so obviously deserves them. Like he should be doing more to help him.

"Right, because gambling has worked out so well for me," he laughs, hoping to diffuse the tension, running his hand back through his sweat-damp hair. "No, I'm just hoping for some quiet. And sleep."

"Me too," the other boy answers after a moment, hyper-casual, "going home. My mom's trying the big American thanksgiving for the first time because my sister's bringing her new _fiancé_."

"I didn't know your sister got engaged."

"Yeah, I think he's an uptight shank, but my parents like him. Whatever," Minho shrugs, "I could kick his shucking ass so…"

Thomas knocks his fist against Minho's shoulder, "I'm sure you could."

"No. Really. I don't think he's ever seen a gym!" Minho sets down his towel entirely, sitting on the locker room bench and launching into story after story about why his sister's boyfriend's ass is kickable, and for a moment, Thomas can almost brush off the almost warning about Newt.

00000

The house is quiet over thanksgiving, everyone but Newt and Thomas are home or at friends' houses for the break by Wednesday around noon and when Chuck gets off school, they fully commit to a video game marathon Newt has been talking about since Thomas learned about his hearing.

Chuck gets a kick out of the fact that Thomas's chosen character is Princess Peach, gloating a little too long about his well-deserved chance to finally be Mario, and they play with the computers on easy. Newt wins most of the time, Thomas a few times, and Chuck finally pulls out a win at the end, jumping up and down and hooting.

It's good to see Chuck happy, he took the news of Newt's diagnosis harder than Thomas expected and spent the night after Thomas told him somber and withdrawn. He didn't seem to know how to treat Newt for a few days, flirting around the edges of his attention until Newt welcomed him back into the circle.

"I think I'm done for the night," Newt picks up the TV remote, "movie?"

"Yeah," Chuck sits back down beside Thomas, kicking his feet on the coffee table and making himself utterly at home. Chuck's foster mom texted Thomas earlier, asking if Chuck would be home for Thanksgiving, and when Thomas said no, he didn't get an answer. This is better anyway though. More comfortable. They'll order Chinese tomorrow and hang out and for the first time, it will actually be a break.

"Go grab one, Chuck, we're not picky," Newt points towards the bookshelf in the corner, the DVD's all labeled with their owner's name. As soon as Chuck is off of the couch, Newt leans in, whispering in Thomas's ear, "Does he know about your date at the courthouse?"

"No," Thomas shakes his head, elbowing Newt slightly when Chuck looks back at them, suspicious. "And he doesn't need to."

"Got one," Chuck says too loudly, putting the DVD in the player and flopping back on the couch, his feet curled underneath him. "Go ahead and bloody play it," he's grinning when he says it and Newt shakes his head, pressing play.

Thomas doesn't notice what movie Chuck chose, the hearing weighing heavily on his mind. He knows the offense isn't a big deal, he's seen kids get away with much more it's just…he thinks about the ever rotating cast of foster-siblings, always disappearing to juvie or being shipped off when his current foster parents couldn't deal with them anymore. It's horrible and he hates it, but he has to admit that the courts aren't easy on kids like him.

He's going to walk in there and look like a trouble maker, his clean record won't matter, they'll just assume that his foster parents were keeping him in line and then what? He thinks of his scholarship, the miracle he's holding onto by a thread, the thing he poured everything into. It might end up being null because of a single mistake and that's so overwhelmingly unfair it practically feels planned. Like someone is poking him with a stick just to see what he'll do.

He doesn't like being poked.

"Did you see that, Newt?!"

"Yeah," Newt shakes his head and smiles, sneaking a sideways glance at Thomas.

It occurs to him that he doesn't know anyone who is as nice to Chuck as Newt is, and he feels awful knowing that his stupid mistake might mean Chuck's brand new support system gets uprooted too.

"This is just like this time at school…"

Chuck blabbers in that open way Thomas misses, the way that drove him crazy when he was ten, the way Chuck hasn't done since he turned twelve and got too cool overnight. Newt nods at the right places, laughing and leaning towards Chuck his arm looping easily around Thomas's shoulders. Chuck should have sat in the middle, this doesn't make sense, Newt's side pressed fully against his right to hear Chuck from his left.

"Alright?" Newt asks quietly. "You've been glaring at the same empty corner for twenty minutes."

"Yeah," Thomas shifts, sitting up a little straighter, the warmth of Newt's arm on the back of his neck oddly bracing. "I'm good."

"What are you guys talking about?" Chuck asks too loudly, turning towards them on the couch and resting his chin in his hand.

"Nothing," Thomas shakes his head.

"Fine," Chuck pouts, looking back at the TV, sneaking glances at Newt every few seconds. He laughs too loudly when Newt laughs, frowning at Thomas when Newt gets up to go get a drink. "Just because Newt is my friend—"

"What are you talking about?" Thomas shakes his head.

"Did you tell him he shouldn't be my friend."

"No, Chuck, that's—here," Thomas scoots to the corner of the couch that Newt just vacated, patting the empty middle cushion. "He can sit next to you, I'm not even—"

"You're trying to take my friends," Chuck narrows his eyes at his older brother.

"Since you're the one in my frat all the time, I think you're trying to take my friends," Thomas smiles in spite of himself, flicking Chuck in the forehead.

Chuck tries to punch him but Thomas catches his fist, batting his arm away and fending off a poorly aimed swat.

"I can't leave you two alone for a minute," Newt walks back in from the kitchen. He doesn't pause, sitting down in the middle of the couch and slinging his arm back around Thomas's shoulders. "And you took my seat, Tommy, you could have just asked."

Thomas feels better, bizarrely, between some stupid, petty argument with Chuck and Newt acting so normal through all of this.

"Yeah, _Tommy_ ," Chuck snickers, elbowing Newt's side like he's in on some excellent joke, "you could have just asked."

00000

"Are you sure this isn't too close to your uhh…thing?" Thomas fumbles for the word, his mind uncomfortably, delightedly cloudy as Newt shares the dregs in his last bottle of rum. Chuck went to bed early after a too big dinner of Chinese takeout and frozen pizza, and it was the one thing that felt like Thanksgiving all day.

Thanksgiving, in Thomas's experience is yelling. It's a turkey burning in the oven, it's kids running around making a horrible mess of everything. It's foster family distant relatives that don't look him in the eye. It's being sent to bed early.

It's not rum in Newt's room at two in the morning, laughing at the blonde's hat pulled too low over his forehead.

"I've got a couple weeks," Newt's syllables drag out when he's drunk in a way that makes Thomas want to listen and he leans closer, nearly falling off of the rolling desk chair. Newt laughs, "they're seeing how it responds to treatment. Next dose is during winter break. Week before Christmas. Until then it's just the big blue pills over there, one a day."

"Do you have to take all of these? What's this one?" Thomas picks up one of the many pill bottles on Newt's desk, squinting at the label, instantly intimidated by the 20 letter word blurring in his too drunk vision.

"Painkiller, I think."

"And this one?" He picks up another. "Something something 'sertraline' something."

"What's so interesting about my bloody pills?" Newt stands, stumbling in a way that exaggerates his limp. "Let's go find something to eat, I'm fucking starving."

Thomas swears he's been practically conditioned to be happy when Newt wants to eat, and like Pavlov's dog looking for a treat, he stands too quickly, catching himself on the other boy's shoulder.

"Hungry. Yes."

"A'right?"

"Drunk," Thomas admits, "it's ok though. It's sort of fun."

"Good that," Newt laughs, brushing something off of Thomas's shoulder and leading the way towards the door.

The kitchen is eerily clean and eerily quiet without anyone milling around looking for a midnight snack or a glass of water. Newt laughs about nothing, leaning briefly on the doorframe, "I've just remembered. I don't know how to bloody cook."

"Where's Frypan when we need him?"

"How dare he have a buggin' family to cook for?" Newt pounds his fist on the counter. "T's a shuck joke."

"Unacceptable."

"My mum tried to teach me how to make eggs once," the blonde opens the fridge and liberates a carton, opening it. "There are four eggs in here, how many eggs do people shucking eat?"

"You're so much more British when you're drunk," Thomas blurts, immediately feeling strange about it when Newt grins.

"And I haven't even offered you tea yet." He shakes his head, "I think I crack them into a bowl and mix them up, that's what my mum did. And then a pan?"

"I'll find a pan."

It takes a few minutes of clanking around before Thomas finds a pan that looks right and sets it on the burner. He turns on the stove and turns back to Newt, who's clumsily stirring a bowl full of eggs.

"Does the pan need anything?"

"Fire, Tommy, that's the whole bloody purpose of a pan."

"Very funny," Thomas rolls his eyes, "I won't share my pan if you aren't nice to me."

"T's called a bloody joke," Newt shakes his head, leaning against the counter and crossing his arms. Maybe it's the rum coursing through his veins but Thomas can't help but notice how impossibly lanky the other boy is, a collection of long swooping lines and fluid joints, his sweatshirt hanging loosely on skinny shoulders.

To be honest, Thomas hates the sweatshirt. He hates the hat. He hates the bulky fabric Newt wears around like a portable hiding place, carrying his walls around with him. He misses Newt in color, Newt's blonde hair over his forehead, reflection golden in dark brown eyes. He suddenly misses something he never had so clearly that his chest hurts and he takes half of a fumbling step towards the other boy.

"You drank too much, Tommy, you need eggs," Newt pushes past him with the bowl, pouring the eggs into the pan. They sizzle, a sort of familiar smell filing the kitchen. "My specialty. As of right now."

"Gotta love watching a master at work."

Newt shifts a bit awkwardly, looking everywhere but at Thomas, "they need salt. Probably."

"We're going to set the house on fire."

"No, we're not," Newt laughs, "I'd never hear the bloody end of that from Alby."

"So I should go set the carpet on fire?"

"No—"

"Can I borrow a lighter?"

"Tommy," Newt says it with a bit of a whine, a sharp edge to his voice, exacerbated by the alcohol and drawn out by the accent, and Thomas inhales sharply.

"What did you call it? A 'bloody joke'?"

"Don't say that," Newt laughs, "you sound so _American_. Should we stir this klunk or something?"

"I have no idea," Thomas steps up to the stove behind Newt, resting his chin on the taller boy's shoulder, unthinking. Newt freezes, reaching for a spatula and poking the still mostly liquid mixture.

"I think it's cooking."

"I've had eggs that are sort of stirred, I think Frypan's are stirred."

When Newt speaks again, Thomas can feel it reverberating in his chest, too close somehow, and far too warm, "One of us is going to have to learn to bloody cook…you know, if we're both going to be here over Christmas. Otherwise, we'll fucking starve."

"It sounds funny when you swear."

"I shucking swear all the bloody time."

"You say 'shuck' all the time. That's not really swearing."

"Means the same thing," Newt shifts back against him, and for a fleeting second, Thomas is so acutely aware of the line of warmth across Newt's back, along the hem of his sweatshirt.

"Not really."

"I think these are done, grab plates?"

"Sure," Thomas moves away, instantly cold, strangely discombobulated as he crosses the kitchen and gets two plates out of the cabinet, setting them on the counter. The eggs pour out of the pan relatively easily, a few dark brown bits sticking behind as Thomas turns off the stove. His mouth waters and he pinches some into his mouth. It's eggs, no doubt, they aren't Frypan's eggs, but they aren't the awful freshmen cafeteria eggs either.

"Are they awful?"

"They're eggs."

"Informative, Tommy. Thanks for that." Newt hip checks him on the way to the dining room handing him a fork. He seems like he's sobering, less giggly, less flushed, the dark sweatshirt and hat back to washing him out and making him look worse than he should. He takes a bite of his own serving, "these are bloody awful."

"Hmm?" Thomas asks around a mouthful, the food hitting his stomach with a comforting sort of warmth. He's feeling better too, more sober, and when he looks across the table, Newt is staring at him, brow furrowed, like he's working out a problem.

"You know, the fact you'll eat my buggin' horrible eggs means something."

"That they aren't as awful as you think?"

"Cute," Newt shakes his head, focusing on his plate a little too intently.

00000

Thomas has never been on this side of the courthouse door. He's taken people before, foster siblings mostly, but always waited outside, unwilling to associate himself with everything going on inside. He needed to distance himself from the supposed inevitable, but that, of course, was completely, totally futile.

His summons is wrinkled and he smooths it awkwardly against his thigh, foot tapping a hyper tattoo against the floor. Newt reaches over from the seat next to him and presses on his knee, leaning in to mutter in his ear.

"Slim it, I think the massive bloke with a million and a half tattoos is thinking about ripping your leg off."

"What?" Thomas jerks his head up, looking around wildly.

"It's an expression," Newt pats his leg and sits up straight, looking at the clock on the wall. "Your hearing was supposed to be at 9, wasn't it?"

"I have to sit here and see if any lawyer calls to offer me a plea bargain," Thomas leans forward, elbows on his knees, cradling his head in his hands. "Like that's going to happen. They're going to call me in there and tell me not only am I losing my scholarship, I'm also going to jail."

"That's a bit pessimistic, don't you think?"

"You don't have to wait in here with me," Thomas looks around again, at the shut door someone might be leading him through any moment.

"Eh," Newt shrugs, scratching under the edge of his wool beanie. It makes him look paler, but older, detracting from the fluffiness his hair has taken on since it started to grow out again. "And leave you freaking out all by your lonesome?"

"I took a foster brother to his hearing once," Thomas blurts, looking down at his shaking hands. "For vandalism. But, I mean, it was worse than this, he spray-painted a giant dick on a fire engine—but he went to juvie. For a year."

"Hey," Newt turns towards him almost sternly, "and you didn't paint even a small dick on anything."

"Not funny."

"You know," Newt shifts, sinking lower in his seat and shoving his hands into his sweatshirt pocket, "you could always tell the truth."

"And get Brenda into trouble?" Thomas shakes his head, "what is it about burning bridges? Oh yeah, you can't go back across them after you do it."

"You're too bloody noble for your own good, you know that?"

"I don't know what to do," Thomas sits up suddenly, clapping his hands against his knees and crunching the already battered summons. "I've never had so much as a detention, because I knew I'd never have a chance of getting out if I didn't have the scholarship and the perfect record and now? Now…this. This." His hands are shaking. He feels sick if he thinks about it too much. Going back to…well, nothing now, because he's 18. He'd have nothing. He wouldn't even be able to have Chuck.

"Hey," Newt grabs one of Thomas's trembling hands out of the air. "You know what this is like? It's like being sick. And someone behind a door you can't go through is deciding what to poison you with next. And there's nothing you can do, unfortunately, you just have to bloody sit and wait to see if you're going to spend the next few months in literal hell."

"I'm never going to a hospital, if it's like this," Thomas squeezes Newt's hand unthinking. "You'll remember that right? Just let me die on the street if I get hit by a car or something. At least then I _know_ what's happening."

"That's a bit dramatic, Tommy."

"I don't like being messed with."

Thomas knows when he says it he isn't talking about the court. He isn't talking about Janson, no matter how irritating he finds the man. He's talking about two people he thought he could trust and a mistake he's never going to make again.

"Tell me about it." Newt drags his thumb over the back of Thomas's hand and it's soothing where it should be weird. Thomas wants to ask about it, about the kiss in Newt's room that was so totally and immediately overshadowed by all of this nonsense. A million questions flood the back of his throat and he tries to find one, the easiest of them, the one that makes his stomach churn the least.

He closes his eyes, trying to breathe, trying to focus on the rhythmic, smooth touch of Newt's skin along his, the bracing cool of the metal back of his chair between his shoulders.

Newt tugs on his hand, "…Tommy. You're up."

"What?"

"Thomas?" The door is open, a woman in a suit reading his name off of a file. "If you could follow me this way."

"Wish me luck," Thomas stands, his hand suddenly cold when Newt lets go.

He follows the woman past two empty offices to a small room with a desk and a computer. She sits down behind the screen and types a few words, tapping her finger against her chin while she reads. "The school has formulated a plea bargain they would like me to offer you," she turns the screen to face him, "if you plead guilty to all charges, the maximum penalty will be 100 hours of community service and probation pending your GPA remains high enough for you to remain on the track team. If you can no longer compete, the bargain will be void."

"What?" Thomas frowns. He thinks of that weekend, his last minute scraping win. The school wants to say they charged the culprit, but they need him. It's the kind of thing Brenda would think was funny if he were talking to her and he shifts slightly. "So I just have to plead guilty, and this turns into 100 hours of community service?"

"Pending your continued involvement on the track team in the spring. The probation lasts until the community service hours are all served."

"Yes," Thomas decides, probably too quickly, reaching for the form and taking the pen she hands him. "Where do I sign?"

It takes a moment to ensure he has all of the necessary information filled out on the form and he checks it twice, making sure he's not signing anything he doesn't want to. He hands the form back to her and walks out to the waiting room, a considerable weight lifted from his chest.

He's barely done telling Newt about the deal when the courtoom calls him in, he pleads guilty, and is out of that dreaded building in fifteen minutes, his pocket thirty-six dollars in court fees lighter.

"I told you it wasn't the end of the world, Tommy," Newt climbs into the drivers' seat of Minho's borrowed car.

"I'm supposed to report for picking up trash the first week of break. I wonder if I could get the 100 hours all done before school starts back up again."

"I'm bloody glad you left some of that doom and gloom behind," Newt grins as he pulls out of the parking lot and onto the freeway for the quick trip home. "You were depressing me more than the shucking cancer."

Thomas feels lighter, like he left some awful thing behind him, and while picking up trash for weeks straight on the side of the road in December isn't his dream way to spend his first winter break free from being under anyone's thumb, but…but well, a few hours ago he thought he was going to end up on the street, kicked out of school and futureless.

They pull into the lot behind the row of fraternities and Newt carefully parks Minho's car in the same place they pulled out of earlier that morning. He tucks the keys in his pocket and moves to get out, but Thomas stops him with a hand on his arm.

"Look, Newt, uh," and suddenly the car seems smaller, warmer, like the heater must still be blasting even though the engine is off. "Thanks, for that. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't offered—"

"Of course I bloody offered—"

"I would have freaked out the whole bus ride over and probably missed my hearing completely because I wasn't paying attention and—thanks. Really."

"Are you stalling on purpose?" Newt looks purposefully at Thomas's hand on his arm, looking back at Thomas's face and frowning slightly.

"I…" Thomas starts to say no, but that's not entirely truthful, is it? He wanted to thank Newt in private, away from prying eyes that would try to see things that weren't there. His hand twitches slightly, making him aware of the warm muscle under the sleeve of Newt's sweatshirt, and he wonders, for a dangerous moment what exactly they might think this looks like.

"Bloody hell," Newt mutters, leaning in so suddenly that Thomas hardly sees it. Just one second, he's across the car, and the next he's so close Thomas could count his eyelashes, one hand tilting Thomas's chin and the other heavy on his thigh as Newt leans over the center console. Their lips meet, and Thomas isn't quite sure who leaned in, and more importantly, more shockingly, he doesn't _care_.

His lips are soft and warm and so unbearably present that Thomas can't think straight at all. He doesn't want to think, he wants to feel, wants to appreciate the subtle rasp of stubble, Newt's hand around the back of his neck, clammy and nervous and inexplicably perfect.

One hand is tugging Newt's hat away, his fingers pushing through the short plush underneath while the other finds Newt's shoulder, holding him there, trying so hard to stop his own head from spinning out of control. And it's not like that night in Newt's room, with the haze and the confusion. It's purposeful when Newt leans into him, their noses pressing together, Newt's hand inching towards the crease of Thomas's thigh and for a while moment, Thomas thinks the older boy is going to land right in his lap.

And that idea should be funny, but something discordantly _hot_ furls in Thomas's stomach, a bolt of lightning zooming across his skin from Newt's hand on his thigh to his core. He pulls back with a gasp, squinting his eyes shut, and the car is too warm, there's no air in here, his lips are numb from the pressure of the kiss and his nerves are buzzing under his skin.

Newt's weight shifts off of him all at once and when he opens his eyes, the blond is sitting in the drivers' seat, looking pointedly forward, his hat stuffed haphazardly on his head.

Thomas thinks of two weeks ago waiting for texts from two different girls. He thinks of Newt's smoky room, the strange weight in his chest afterwards. He's so confused he's physically dizzy, a million emotions whirling through his mind at once. Relief, because his legal disaster is over, anger, because it happened in the first place, but drowning them both is the heat in his chest he can't escape from, can't explain.

Newt looks at him with a pinched, closed expression, "I take it I misread the situation."

Thomas nods without thinking, because he can't read his own mind, how should Newt be able to?

"Bloody brilliant," Newt shakes his head, wrenching the car door open with a gust of cold air that brings Thomas halfway back to his senses. "Lock up on your way out." Newt slams the door and stalks towards the house, hands tucked in his pockets, hunched against the wind, his mysterious limp the most obvious Thomas has ever seen it.

00000


End file.
